THE TEMPER OF 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Glarfe Xectures given at {Trinity College, GambrtDge 
in tbe 10ear 1902-1903 



BY 

BARRETT WENDELL 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT HARVARD COLLEGE 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1904 






27 1904 

^onvrteht etr.rv 






Copyright, 1904, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published, October, 1904 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

My original plan for the lectures contained in this 
book would have made them, as a whole, twice as 
long as they are. I meant to treat the second half 
of the seventeenth century quite as fully as I treated 
the first. The circumstances under which the lectures 
were given, at Trinity College, prevented this. The 
time at my disposal proved so limited that I must 
either greatly condense the first part of my work or 
else frankly change the scale on which I should con- 
sider the Age of Dryden. I chose the latter course. 

Having done so, I thought for a good while that, 
before venturing to print any of this material, I had 
best rewrite it, restoring the proportions of the orig- 
inal plan. Various circumstances have prevented 
such rewriting, until it has become evident that the 
lectures must either appear as they were given or not 
appear at all. For several reasons, the former course 
has seemed on the whole preferable. 

In the first place, a considerable part of what in- 
terest the lectures may have must arise from the fact 
that, so far as I am aware, they are the first regular 
lectures concerning English literature ever given by 



Vi PREFACE 

an American at an English university. To alter them 
would be in some degree to misrepresent them. 

In the second place, these lectures, made for deliv- 
ery, not to students but to a popular academic audi- 
ence, are naturally rather a running comment on the 
subject in question — a series of essays — than a formal 
treatise. To turn them into anything like a severe 
and comprehensive form would be at once the work 
of years rather than of months, and so radical an 
alteration of their character that, whatever the result, 
they would no longer be the kind of thing they are. 

In the third place, and by far chiefly, they seemed to 
me about as expressive as I could make them of what 
I wished to say. For my purpose was not to write a 
standard history of English literature in the seven- 
teenth century, touching on every man and work 
therein included, and giving to each of these, great 
and small, a value and a place which I might hope 
should be permanent. My purpose was only to indi- 
cate, as best I could, the manner in which the national 
temper of England, as revealed in seventeenth-century 
literature, changed from a temper ancestrally com- 
mon to modern England and to modern America, and 
became, before the century closed, something which 
later time must recognize as distinctly, specifically 
English. Whether these lectures make my view of 
this national transformation clear, it is not for me to 
judge; but I feel pretty sure that, even as they stand, 
they make it as clear as I am now able to. In this 



PREFACE vii 

opinion I have been strengthened by the experience of 
the year which has intervened since the lectures were 
given. During that year I have treated the matters 
which they concern in my regular courses of instruc- 
tion at Harvard College. In these courses, the scale 
was naturally much larger than that of the Clark lect- 
ures, but I could not discover that this enlargement 
of scale in any way altered the main outlines of my 
conception. 

It is perhaps superfluous to say that any such treat- 
ment of a large subject as I have here attempted 
involves no special study of other than obvious au- 
thorities. Accordingly, it has seemed needless to 
encumber this book with bibliographic matter or with 
notes. It is not superfluous, however, to add here a 
word of my gratitude to the friends and the colleagues 
who have kindly let me talk with them about the 
matters in question, and whose suggestions have from 
time to time been deeply helpful. Among these friends 
I cannot refrain from naming two: Professor William 
Allan Neilson, now of Columbia University, and Dr. 
Chester Noyes Greenough, until very lately Instructor 
in English at Harvard. 

Yet, after all, the friends who come most vividly 
to mind as I write these lines are not the old friends 
of our New England Cambridge. They are rather 
the new friends who welcomed me so cordially to 
their own Cambridge two years ago. In the lect- 
ures themselves, I have said something of what that 



Vlll 



PREFACE 



welcome meant to me; it was not only a personal 
experience of kindness which can never be forgotten; 
it was a constant assurance that they had at heart 
what I had at heart too. Loyal Englishmen can never 
be Americans, nor loyal Americans Englishmen; but 
no patriotic loyalty can ever affect the truth that Eng- 
lishmen and Americans are ancestrally brethren. And 
whoever does his best to strengthen the sense and the 
ties of our kinship does a good deed for the future of 
this puzzling world. 

To name these new-found friends individually would 
be to name all those whom I had the good fortune 
to meet during my pleasant months in England. 
Among them, however, is one group, to whom I owe 
most of all, for it was at their bidding that I came to 
the deep pleasure which those months brought me. 
Had chance made these lectures in themselves mem- 
orable enough to warrant hope that they deserved 
such honor, I should have asked leave to give them a 
formal dedication. And that dedication could have 
been to none but the Master and Fellows of Trinity. 

Barrett Wendell. 

Nahant, Massachusetts, July 15, 1904. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Elizabethan Literature i 

II. The Disintegration of the Drama ... 46 

III. The Decline of the Drama 74 

IV. The Divergent Masters of Lyric Poetry . 101 

V. The Disintegration of Lyric Poetry . .128 

VI. The Development of Prose 155 

The Bible and Bacon. 

VII. The Development of Prose 184 

Ralegh, Burton and Browne. 

VIII. The Earlier Puritanism 207 

IX. The Later Puritanism 237 

X. Milton Before the Civil Wars .... 267 

XL The Maturity of Milton 302 

XII. The Age of Dryden 327 

INDEX 357 



THE TEMPER OF 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

I 

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

It is hard, they say, for any European to under- 
stand what Europe means to an American. We Amer- 
icans are separated from the Old World by eight or 
ten generations. We have no more personal tradi- 
tions of the regions from which our ancestors sailed 
westward in the seventeenth century than Englishmen 
have of the Continental lowlands which bred the 
Angles and the Saxons. Yet our historical traditions 
are so closely intertwined with those of ancestral 
Europe — and of England beyond the rest — that we 
cannot feel ourselves a race apart. Hawthorne spoke 
for us all when he called England "our old home." 

So the kind invitation which summoned me from 
Cambridge in New England to the Cambridge from 
which ours derived not only its traditions but its 
very name, brought me a pleasure which none but 
an American can fully know. It was deeper than that 

i 



2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which must always come from welcome to a strange 
yet friendly land; deeper, too, than that which my 
countrymen must always feel in the immemorial hu- 
manity of Europe. It combined them ; and, more than 
all, it touched the heart, like the pleasure which should 
come from mutual recognition of a kinship for a while 
half forgotten. 

At the same time, like other earthly delights, this 
pleasure was not flawless. It involved the grim real- 
ity of duties. Among them none was more pressing 
than that of choosing the period in the literature of 
England concerning which, as an American, I might 
but speak to Englishmen. My choice was soon made ; 
but the subject of it — The Seventeenth Century in 
English Literature — may well have seemed so far 
from novel as to give rise to apprehensive wonder 
whether there was anything left to say about it. If 
it be in my power to quiet such apprehension, I may 
best do so by telling why I chose such a disconcert- 
ing topic. 

Literature, in the first place, is so comprehensive 
a term that anyone who habitually uses it can hardly 
help, after a while, unconsciously giving it some spe- 
cial meaning of his own. As nearly as I can define 
what literature has come to mean for me, it may be 
called the lasting expression in words of the meaning 
of life. Any such definition must be vague; but even 
from this vague phrase, you will perhaps begin to feel 
the first article of faith which I have striven to in- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 3 

elude in it ; namely, that the most significant literature 
is that which the spontaneous selection of posterity 
has kept alive from generation to generation — the great 
men first, whom everybody knows; the lesser men 
next, whom everybody remembers; and only very sub- 
ordinate^ the numberless men whom most people have 
contentedly forgotten. In studying any subject what- 
ever, w r e have to simplify it by neglect of countless, 
bewildering details ; and on the whole those which we 
may most confidently neglect are those which the hu- 
man race has obviously been able to do without. Our 
definition of literature will accordingly confine our 
attention as students to men and works which are 
more or less familiar. 

Our next question is how we should consider them. 
In this scientific age, the orthodox way is doubtless 
to deal with them as facts, inquiring what influences 
and what surroundings produced this book or that, 
and answering such inquiries with a precision which 
shall delight people who have to cram certainties for 
purposes of competitive examination. What is more, 
one cannot speak too respectfully of this admirable 
orthodoxy ; for it has brought an approach to rational 
order out of what was lately a sentimental chaos. 
Yet I shall not follow its methods. For, having 
grown to think of literature not only as a lasting 
expression, but as a lasting expression of the meaning 
of life, I have grown to care for it mostly, not as an 
historical fact nor yet as an aesthetic, but rather as a 



4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

temperamental. The literature of any nation may be 
likened to the talk or to the letters of men we know. 
What we come to care for in our friends is not their 
circumstances but themselves; and we feel that we 
confidently know them not when we can glibly state 
facts about them, but when, with such indefinable cer- 
tainty as assures us of the savor of a fruit or the scent 
of a flower, we can instinctively recognize in each the 
qualities which are peculiarly his own. So a litera- 
ture" seems to me most interesting, and most signifi- 
cant, when we consider it as the unconscious expres- 
sion of national temper. 

A cant phrase that last may seem — at best elusive; 
yet few have more meaning. As history unfolds itself, 
one grows to feel, it reveals nothing which may better 
give us pause than the wonderfully various characters 
of the nations who in turn rise and flourish and de- 
cline. Though these characters express themselves in 
widely various ways, — in conduct, in policy, in social 
or economic peculiarities, in plastic art, — there is no 
other phase of this expression quite so habitual, and 
therefore quite so surely characteristic, as that which 
takes the form of language. It is by means of lan- 
guage, incalculably more than by any other, that men 
not only communicate with one another but commune 
with their very selves. A common language, one 
grows to feel, is a closer bond than common blood. 
For at heart the truest community which men can 
know is community of ideals; and inextricably inter- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 5 

woven with the structure of any language — with its 
words, with its idioms, with its syntax, and nowadays 
even with its very orthography — are the ideals which, 
recognized or not, have animated and shall animate 
to the end those who instinctively phrase their earthly 
experience in its terms. 

By happy chance, England and America think and 
speak in a common language. However Englishmen 
and Americans may differ, accordingly, they have 
never yet differed when, in simplicity of heart, they 
have tried to state to themselves their ideals of duty. 
Morally, we both agree, we are bound, with what 
power is in us, to do right; and by doing right we 
mean, whether we quite know it or not, what mil- 
lions of our forefathers have meant by obeying the 
will of God; and furthermore, whatever our personal 
convictions, we cannot escape that heritage of our 
common speech which accepts as guides to righteous- 
ness so many of the consecrated phrases of the Eng- 
lish Bible. Politically, the while, we are at one in 
believing that our chief duty is to maintain our rights ; 
and by rights we mean no untested abstractions, but 
those freedoms, on which no power may encroach un- 
resisted, secured us by the unwritten and the written 
principles of ancestral English law. 

Yet, whoever should conclude from this that Eng- 
land and America are all at one, or have been so, for 
these two centuries at least, would let his logic belie 
history. Neither our common language nor the con- 



6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

sequent identity of our moral and political ideals have 
preserved our national tempers from a divergence 
which began almost as soon as the American colonies 
were settled. To-day there has come to us a world- 
need of closer union, of better mutual understanding, 
than has been ours in the past. That need, I believe, 
will grow more pressing in days to come. You will 
see whither these considerations have led me. Bidden 
to choose the period in the literature of England which 
we might but consider together, I could not fail to 
ask myself at once what period might most help us 
— of England and of America alike — to understand 
each other. And thus my choice fell inevitably on the 
seventeenth century. 

For, in 1600 there was no America at all. Your 
ancestors and ours were Englishmen, subject to Queen 
Elizabeth. Broadly speaking, we may say that the 
colony of Virginia was finally settled about 1610; that 
the Pilgrims made their landing at Plymouth in 1620; 
and that the neighboring colony of Massachusetts Bay 
had founded its capital city of Boston by 1630. From 
these three sources, it is commonly agreed, have flowed 
the streams of tradition — the intellectual, the moral, 
the political ideals — which have nurtured the national 
temper of America. It was clearly in the first third 
of the seventeenth century — in years when every man 
of mature age had been born under Queen Elizabeth 
— that these streams parted from those which have 
nurtured the national temper of modern England. 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 7 

Again, this parting, which has led to the divergence 
of our national tempers, may be likened to a parting 
of friends who presently become in some degree es- 
tranged. If they have ever been at one, it is clear 
that when divergence grows insuperable one or the 
other must have suffered change. Accordingly, those 
who have recognized how England and America have 
tended apart, have been apt to assume that in England 
the temper of our ancestral race has remained little 
altered, while in the virgin soil of our new continent 
our transplanted shoots have run into wildly different 
luxuriances of their own. The terms of the Clark 
Lectureship restrict us to the literature of England. 
I shall barely mention, accordingly, a fact in the lit- 
erary history of the seventeenth-century America 
which is hardly in accordance with this general as- 
sumption concerning American development. Through- 
out the seventeenth century, American publications 
were so monotonous, in body and in soul, that with- 
out constant reference to title-pages no human being 
could guess whether a given paragraph was written 
by an Elizabethan or by his godly grandchildren un- 
der King William III. During that same century, on 
the other hand, the literary records of England tell 
a very different story. In 1600, Shakspere was at 
the height of his productive power; in 1650, Milton 
had for ten years been a writer chiefly of controversial 
prose; in 1700, John Dryden died, having crowned 
his critical work with the masterly preface to his 



8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

recklessly collected folio of Fables. That seventeenth 
century, in brief, when the streams of our national 
lives first parted, proves in America a period of al- 
most stationary national temper; in England, the 
while, the temper of the nation, as expressed by liter- 
ature, underwent the most conspicuous change in all 
its history. 

For Shakspere was a man of his time; and equally 
a man of his time was Dryden; and both flourished 
and died during the century which we are to consider 
together. Yet Shakspere has more in common with 
Chaucer, who died in 1400, than with Dryden, who 
was born only fifteen years after the greatest of mod- 
ern poets was laid under his quaint epitaph in Strat- 
ford Church; and Dryden has less in common with 
Shakspere than with countless other writers of 
sound prose who have illustrated the reign of Queen 
Victoria. One may carry the contrast further. It is 
hardly excessive to say that every vestige of English 
literature before 1600 may naturally be grouped to- 
gether, with the literature before the Civil Wars; and 
that every record of English literature since 1700 may, 
with equal good sense, be grouped together, with the 
literature since the Restoration. We can begin to see 
why to anyone who desires to consider how the na- 
tional tempers of England and of America have 
diverged, there is no other period of English litera- 
ture so instructive as this seventeenth century. For 
during that century, the temper of England, as ex- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE o 

pressed in literature, underwent such a change as 
comes to human beings when they suddenly lapse from 
childhood to youth, from youth to maturity, or from 
maturity to age. 

In the hours which we are to pass together, I shall 
accordingly try to tell you how this period has ap- 
peared to an American who, with no too toilsome 
study, has been reading and pondering about it, at 
Harvard College, for a good many years. First I 
shall try to set forth the state of English literature 
in 1600, when the century began. Then I shall try 
to show how the temper of this elder time altered; 
how the drama declined; how lyric poetry disinte- 
grated; how prose tended on the whole to develop; 
and how beneath this various change there was surg- 
ing toward the surface of national life a force which 
never found full literary expression — the passionate 
idealism of the Puritans. I shall then turn to the 
earlier poems of Milton, which in some aspects sum- 
marize this part of the story. Then I shall touch on 
Milton's prose and on his later and greater poems; 
and finally, in more cursory manner, I shall glance at 
the further course of seventeenth-century literature 
in England, until the death of Dryden brings its story 
to an end. 



Our first business, we have seen, is to render our- 
selves some account of the state in which English 



io THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

literature appeared when the century we are to con- 
sider began. In 1600 the reign of Queen Elizabeth 
was drawing to its close; and to that reign we owe 
almost all of what is now treasured, from years be- 
fore 1600, as the modern literature of England. When 
Elizabeth came to the throne, the work of Chaucer 
was already what it seems to us — the sole survivor 
of an archaic elder time. Between Chaucer's death, 
in 1400, and the middle of the sixteenth century, al- 
most the only English publications which have lasted 
were Sir Thomas Malory's version of the Arthurian 
legends; sundry ballads which — for all their perennial 
vitality — had hardly risen above the condition of folk- 
song; the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More; and the 
earlier versions of those wonderful translations which 
finally ripened into the Authorized Version of the 
Bible and into the supreme liturgical rhythm of the 
Book of Common Prayer. It is hardly by figure of 
speech that we call the first period of modern English 
literature Elizabethan. Only a year before the acces- 
sion of the great queen came the book which is com- 
monly agreed to mark when modern English literature 
began. 

This was the collection of "Songes and Sonettes," 
generally called "Tottel's Miscellany." It finally put 
into the accessible permanence of print a considerable 
number of the verses, hitherto existing only in manu- 
script, which for many years previously had been ha- 
bitually made by accomplished men of fashion. The 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE n 

two of these poets who were personally most eminent, 
and so whose names are most frequently associated 
with the little volume, were Sir Thomas Wyatt and 
the Earl of Surrey, both of whom had died under 
King Henry VIII. During the last century or so, 
the poems of each have been separately collected and 
annotated more than once; and if we chose to study 
each by himself we could easily discover in each a 
distinct individuality. For the moment, however, it 
is better worth our while to observe that as their 
verses appeared in the first of English poetical miscel- 
lanies, they seem neither sharply distinguished from 
each other nor yet saliently different from those of 
the other poets whose work completes the volume. 
All this poetical expression evidently sprang from men 
of freshly awakened perception. One and all of these 
men were youthfully sensitive to the beauties and the 
graces of foreign literatures which they had only just 
learned to know ; all were eager to prove whether the 
untamed language of their still uncultured country 
was capable, or not, of such effects as had already 
been achieved by the revived civilization of Italy and 
of France. In sum, their effort was to domesticate 
in English the exotic beauties of Continental poetry.- 
Accordingly they never dreamed of what we should 
now call invention ; they translated, they adapted, they 
imitated; they were frankly, spontaneously experi- 
mental ; and their experiments never quite attained the 
ease of mastery. 



i2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Already, however, these experiments had revealed 
two facts. Certain foreign forms which they at- 
tempted proved unmanageable in English. Others 
showed instant sign that they might soon flourish. 
Of these, the most noteworthy was the sonnet. Eng- 
lish is so far less rich in rhyme than the Latin tongues 
amid which this elaborate species of verse first ap- 
peared that one might have expected failure. The 
rapid development of the English sonnet came from 
the fact that its ten-syllabled line — the line of Chaucer 
in the old days, of blank-verse later, and of the heroic 
couplet — happens to be very like the normal rhythm 
of English speech. That line, in brief, proved idio- 
matic; so did certain other verse-forms which the 
early Elizabethans attempted — forms which resembled 
the spontaneously 'idiomatic rhythm of the popular 
native ballads. If "Tottel's Miscellany" had proved 
nothing more, it would have proved that English 
verse had reached a point where it would soon 
develop idiomatic forms. But the "Miscellany" 
proved another fact more important still. This hith- 
erto untamed English had doubtless possessed wild 
beauties, such as even Sidney says he found in the 
artless ballads which stirred him like a trumpet. 
Hitherto, however, English had hardly been proved 
capable of deliberate lyric effect. Now, in the 
hands of these enthusiastic makers of poetic experi- 
ment, the language instantly revealed the lyric power 
long since acknowledged. Quite apart from all ques- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 13 

tions of form or of substance, English words, in 
immortal collocation, proved capable of exciting such 
impalpable, unmistakable delight as springs from the 
beauties of untrammelled music. 

From this beginning there had grown before 1600, 
a seemingly inexhaustible luxuriance of lyric poetry. 
In 1550, except for popular songs and experimental 
manuscripts, there was hardly such a thing as an 
English lyric. In 1600, the wealth of our lyric verse 
was such that if the period of Elizabeth had achieved 
nothing else, it would always have been memorable 
in literary history. 

At first, as we have seen, this lyric verse was ob- 
viously experimental. Before long, however, it so 
strengthened that one constantly forgets its relations 
to the other literatures which it still imitated. Still 
experimental in truth, it flows so freely that there is 
little trace left of consciousness, of deliberation. Take 
any familiar collection of true Elizabethan lyrics — the 
first Book of Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," for ex- 
ample. You will feel first their beauty, and next what 
seems their inexhaustible spontaneity. You will never 
stop to wonder from what foreign model this lovely 
phrase or that — this or that grace of rhythm — may 
have been copied. You will be content to linger 
awhile in a world of fathomless music. 

When the seventeenth century began, this music was 
at its height. Various notes, no doubt, were begin- 
ning to sound apart from the rest; but one thinks first 



i 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

not of impending variety — rather of the still palpable 
integrity of lyric temper. And in this aspect the lyrics 
of Elizabethan England were typical of all the litera- 
ture about them. 

Before 1550, for example, — apart from the Prayer 
Book and the ripening translations of the Bible, — there 
was in print very little English prose which has 
proved lasting. Just as our language had not yet 
asserted its lyric power, it had not yet declared itself 
efficient for anything much higher than every-day use. 
Until well after 1600, for that matter, English prose 
was rarely used for other than practical purposes — 
information or instruction. Yet one has only to re- 
call a few familiar names to be reminded of what 
Elizabethan prose had already achieved. Foxe had 
published that grim "Book of Martyrs" which was so 
long to stimulate the ardors of extreme Protestantism, 
and a generation later Hooker had set forth the greater 
part of his sweetly reasonable plea for the Church of 
England. Hakluyt was collecting those records of 
exploration and adventure which tell how the old 
hemispheric world was rounding into our own plan- 
etary one. Chronicles, like those of Stowe and of 
Holinshed, stirred conscious patriotism by placing 
within reach of all who would read, or listen, the 
legendary and recorded facts of national history. 
There were translations from the classics, too, — the 
best, perhaps, Sir Thomas North's "Plutarch," — 
which were opening anew the whole world of ancient 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 15 

tradition, fresh again, for the while, with a novelty as 
alluring as that of the future continents in the western 
seas. And there were translations as well from mod- 
ern literatures — chap-books some of them, others col- 
lected in such treasuries as Painter's "Palace of Pleas- 
ure." The hasty list is already long enough. 

By 1600, it assures us, English prose was already 
alive; and this prose had set forth, in abundance, the 
motives which were awakening England and English 
literature into their full national integrity. The rec- 
ords of the voyagers told how the old bounds of the 
physical world were broken — how there was more 
than men could know or dream of beyond the pillars 
of Hercules. The chronicles implicitly asserted how 
England had its own history — its heroes, its national 
traditions, its inevitable policies to come. The folios 
of Foxe, chained with the Bible in the churches, as- 
serted the most extreme doctrines of the Reformation. 
The translations from elder literatures asserted mean- 
while the wide-spread spirit of the Renaissance — with 
all its inspiration from antiquity and all its freshly 
pagan humanism. 

This spirit, indeed — the spirit which most animated 
lyric verse — was the most pervasive of all. Through- 
out Elizabethan prose one feels a quality of sponta- 
neity, of eager experiment, like that which one can feel 
in Elizabethan poetry. Like the poetry, too, that prose 
had not yet reached a stage where one can instantly 
feel the divergence of individual styles. It had a fine 



16 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

integrity of its own, so like the integrity of the verse 
that as one considers them together one feels the prose 
fall into deep harmonic chords, strengthening and de- 
fining the spontaneous lyric music which soars above 
them. 

It was amid this environment of strengthening lyric 
poetry and of increasingly vital prose that the master- 
pieces of true Elizabethan literature grew into being. 
On these we must dwell a little more carefully, — on 
Lily's work and Sidney's, on the swiftly greater 
achievements of Spenser, and on the wonderful de- 
velopment of the English drama. Yet before pro- 
ceeding to them, we may well stop to remark a fact 
which their very names would imply. Though, in 
various ways of their own, Lily and Sidney and Spen- 
ser, and even the dramatists, set forth moods which on 
scrutiny prove Protestant, any careless reader might 
scan them from end to end with little reminder of the 
Reformation. So, too, a careless ear might listen long 
to the multitude of lyric poets with no suspicion that 
the morning air about them was charged with ele- 
ments which were to concentrate in the earthly aus- 
terities and the heavenly ecstasies of the English Puri- 
tans. Even the prose at which we glanced contained 
only one work which inevitably suggests Puritanism, 
and that is Foxe's "Martyrs," published as early as 
1563, and so comprehensive in its Protestantism as 
to have been welcome even at Little Gidding. The 
conclusion which would follow from these hasty facts 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 17 

is really true. As a record of English temper, Eliza- 
bethan literature has one deep defect; for, at least in 
lasting literature, Elizabethan Puritanism was inar- 
ticulate. 

Yet, if we were studying together, not the litera- 
ture of this period but its history, Puritanism would 
be the phase of English temper on which we might 
perhaps be forced to dwell most of all. And even our 
consideration of the national temper of England, as 
expressed in literature, cannot neglect it. For the 
moment, however, all we need remember is that while 
other phases of this national temper began to find 
lasting literary expression, Puritanism, for all the 
voluminousness of its homiletic and controversial 
utterance, remained only evanescently articulate. The 
phases of expression, on the other hand, which really 
ripened in the last years of the sixteenth century — 
which by 1600 were articulately developed — were one 
or two kinds of deliberately artistic literature, in both 
prose and verse, and above all the drama. 

Neglecting lesser men, there are certainly three 
so eminent in the history of deliberate literature, 
apart from the drama, that we cannot neglect them: 
these are Lily, Sidney, and Spenser. Virtually of 
the same age — all three born between 1552 and 
1554 — they chance to mark three distinct phases 
in the swift development of Elizabethan litera- 
ture during the years of their maturity. Of these 
three phases, that marked by Lily is the earliest. 



18 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Apart from his little lyric, "Cupid and Campaspe," 
hardly a line of his work has survived in general 
memory. But in its own day, his "Euphues" was 
by far the most popular book which had ever ap- 
peared in English; and, indeed, it has given our lan- 
guage a generic term — Euphuism — still used to define 
the quality of a style over-burdened with fantastic, 
affected prettiness. 

Modern scholarship has demonstrated that "Eu- 
phues" was far from original. The demonstration 
was hardly needful; in our modern, individualistic 
sense, no Elizabethan man of letters troubled his wits 
or his conscience about originality. The men of that 
happy elder time were not so self-conscious as to 
crave self-expression for its own sake, nor yet so 
squeamish as to have any more scruple than a mod- 
ern man of science against appropriating and using 
whatever had anywhere been published by anyone else. 
So, no doubt, "Euphues" was closely modelled on a 
kind of fantastic literature at one time fashionable in 
Spain, in Italy, and elsewhere; and, no doubt, too, it 
was far from the first English work of its kind. If 
we desire, indeed, to make sure of precisely what 
Euphuism was, as distinguished from anything else, 
we must analyze it with distressing minuteness. 
"When we find this parisonic antithesis," writes a 
studious German, who has devoted previous pages to 
demonstrating what Euphuism was not, — "When we 
find this parisonic antithesis with transverse allitera- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 19 

tion and consonance, these endless comparisons from 
nature, and that predilection for allusions and exam- 
ples from ancient mythology, history, and literature, 
we may say we have Euphuism." Very true; and 
yet, until we can make ourselves understand how all 
this extravagance delighted, instead of boring, the 
world to which it was addressed, we can have no idea 
of what Euphuism meant. 

"Euphues" pretends to be a novel. But it has no 
particular plot, no vestige of character, no trace of 
atmosphere or background; nothing, in short, but ex- 
traordinary and inexhaustible ingenuity of phrase. 
Sometimes this takes the form of epigram or aphor- 
ism — never remarkable for other than trite wisdom; 
oftener it is a mere question of extravagant fantasy 
in combination of words. The one indubitable, per- 
vasive fact about the style of Lily is that almost every 
sentence is turned in a deliberately unexpected way. 
And the one and only conceivable human appetite to 
which such a style could ever have appealed is an 
unslaked thirst for novelty. Euphuism, in short, with 
its swift and wide popularity, is only another evidence 
of that eager delight in experiment which we found, 
a little while ago, so deeply characteristic of Eliza- 
bethan lyrics. The world which welcomed it was an 
almost child-like world, loving novelty so eagerly that 
even verbal novelty was an unaffected delight. For 
this merely verbal novelty revealed to Elizabethan 
readers a fact then quite new : it proved that their own 



2o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

English language, hitherto not more than a useful 
thing, was capable of something more. This English, 
it told them, can in itself delight us; listen, there is 
no reason why we should not thus be delighted for- 
ever. 

Except, of course, that novelties go out of fashion 
almost as swiftly as they come into the same. And 
Lily, who had the precious faculty of instinctively 
feeling what his public would welcome, rested content 
with the two parts of his "Euphues" — the first pub- 
lished in 1579, the second a year later. From that 
time on he stopped writing novels, and turned himself 
to plays. We shall revert to him when we come to 
the drama. Now we must speed on to Sidney. 

For, even if Sidney's accidents of birth, of circum- 
stance, of happily heroic and premature death, had 
not made him a national hero, he would have remained 
memorable in mere literature. He had the divine 
gift of fascination, of personal charm. His best- 
remembered work is the "Defence of Poesie," in which 
he so courteously answered the Puritan, Gosson, who 
had presumptuously dedicated to him a rather scurril- 
ous attack on all fine art. Sidney's "Defence" has 
obvious limits; just at the moment when the Eliza- 
bethan drama was dawning, for example, it pedantic- 
ally asserts principles which would have made the 
career of Shakspere impossible. Nevertheless, the 
book can still give pleasure. You take it up as a 
student. Before you are aware that your mood has 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 21 

begun to change, you find yourself turning the pages 
as a reader, hardly disposed to trouble yourself with 
inquiries as to whether you agree with assertions 
phrased so winningly. 

The same quality pervades Sidney's earlier work — 
the "Arcadia," of which the posthumous publication 
is said to have made euphuism seem old-fashioned. 
More than once, when I have opened the book for 
study, I have found myself reading on, I could hardly 
tell why; and that accident has never been known to 
occur in the case of "Euphues." Partly, no doubt, 
this is because the "Arcadia," frankly imitative of 
foreign models though it be, has some vestige of a 
plot; because its characters, too, have some occasional 
semblance of vitality; and because, here and there, its 
descriptions suggest the beauties of Nature, while 
oftener still they call to mind the immortal unrealities 
of Renaissance painting. Most of all, however, this 
quiet fascination is a question of style. The style of 
Sidney, like that of Lily, was deliberately and inge- 
niously experimental; but, unlike Lily's, it sometimes 
rose to excellence. The most familiar example of it is 
the prayer which the first edition of "Eikon Basilike" 
professed to have been used, with very slight altera- 
tions, by King Charles in the hour of his agony. Mil- 
ton detected the origin of the words, and pointed it 
out in a manner so far from sympathetic — I had 
almost said so scurrilous — that the passage disap- 
peared from later editions of the "Eikon." But mod- 



22 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ern feeling would be apt to hold King Charles more 
nearly right than Milton. Here is the prayer, put by 
Sidney into the lips of an imprisoned heroine: 

"O All-seeing Light and eternall Life of all things, 
to whom nothing is either so great that it may resist 
or so small that it is contemned, look upon my misery 
with thine eye of mercy, and let thine infinite power 
vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance 
unto me, as to thee shall seem most convenient. Let 
not injury, O Lord, triumph over me, and let my 
faults by thy hand be corrected, and make not mine 
unjust enemy the minister of thy justice. But yet, 
my God, if in thy wisdom this be the aptest chastise- 
ment for my inexcusable folly, if this low bondage be 
the fittest for my over-high desires, if the pride of 
my not enough humble heart be thus to be broken, 
O Lord, I yield unto thy will, and joyfully embrace 
what sorrow thou wilt have me suffer. Only thus 
much let me crave of thee (let my craving, O Lord, 
be accepted of thee, since even that proceeds from 
thee), let me crave, even by the noblest title which 
in my great affliction I give myself, that I am thy 
creature, and by thy goodness (which is thyself) that 
thou wilt suffer some beams of thy majesty so to 
shine into my mind that it may still depend confi- 
dently on thee. Let calamity be the exercise but not 
the overthrow of my virtue; let their power prevail, 
but prevail not to destruction; let my greatness be 
their prey; let my pain be the sweetness of their 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 23 

revenge; let them (if so it seem good unto thee) 
vex me with more and more punishment. But, O 
Lord, let never their wickedness have such a hold but 
that I may carry a pure mind in a pure body. (And 
pausing a while) And, O most gracious Lord, what- 
ever become of me, preserve the virtuous Musidorus." 

The dignity, the beauty, the pathos of this prayer, 
as a whole, make us at first prone to forget what the 
final sentence so instantly recalls to mind — that in 
truth these noble words, as Sidney wrote them, were 
not a heart-felt expression of devout feeling, but 
only one more beautiful rhetorical experiment. In 
fact, they are no more than another effort, like the 
euphuisms of Lily, to show the hardly precedented 
effects of which our new-found English was capable. 

This experimental quality of Sidney's style is most 
evident in the verses interspersed throughout the 
"Arcadia." Even if we had no other records — of his 
embryonic academy, the "Areopagus," and the like 
— these metrical experiments would abundantly prove 
how eagerly and industriously Sidney tried to nation- 
alize in English the literary forms which delighted 
him when his wits strayed abroad. Some of the verses 
he thus made are admirable examples of the sponta- 
neous beauty which vivifies all the lasting Elizabethan 
lyrics; others, particularly when he tried to subject 
the stubbornly modern rhythm of English to what 
he believed the immutable laws of classical prosody, 
are almost comically impotent. The fact that his 



24 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

achievements and his failures stand side by side — that 
one can never feel sure whether he had a shade of 
question that each of his efforts was as good as the 
last or the next — reveals the truth about even the 
ripest beauties of his endless, rambling romance. From 
beginning to end, like "Euphues" itself, the "Arcadia" 
was imitative of foreign models, innocently predatory 
of whatever it chose to take to itself, and, above all, 
consciously experimental. 

Experimental in some degree, too, were the sonnets 
which are Sidney's highest poetical achievement. In 
one aspect, the unfinished and somewhat confused 
sequence, which he called "Astrophel and Stella," 
seems only a deliberate effort, far more nearly suc- 
cessful than any before it, to prove English capable 
of such effects as had already made immortal the 
sonnet-sequences of Italy. In another aspect, despite 
all their artificialities, these sonnets seem so genuine 
that, in our literal age, one is disposed to marvel 
how the pathetic story which they tell can have re- 
mained so long neglected by romantic poets of later 
times. Whatever the truth — whether they were mere 
experiments or the actual record of a deeply ideal love 
— there can be no doubt that their publication in 1591 
set a fashion. Before 1600, the sonnet-sequence had 
become a popular and a permanent form of English 
literature; and had Sidney left no other literary trace, 
he would still be memorable as the first masterly writer 
of English sonnets. 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 25 

Traces enough he left besides, not only in literature 
but in the heart of national tradition. There is only 
one other, however, on which we have time now to 
touch : he was the friend, the patron, and to some 
degree the instigator of the single poet among his 
immediate contemporaries whose achievement has won 
permanent place not only in English literature, but in 
the literature of the world. This was Spenser. 

The Poet's Poet he has been called so long — he 
has proved so long and so surely an inspiration to 
those who have tried to make our language an instru- 
ment of beauty — that one is apt to forget how he was 
once only another poet among the rest who were 
making the new literature of England. Not to speak 
of his other work, the "Faerie Queene" — though it 
remains, like some grandly begun cathedral, only a 
colossal fragment — is beyond doubt a masterpiece. 
You may despair as much as you like over the pre- 
Quixotic intricacies of its tenuous plot; you may lose 
your way, again and again, in futile efforts to follow 
the invisible thread of its allegories; you may lay the 
book down, more than once or twice, dazed for the 
moment with the sweetness of its melody; but you 
may search it almost in vain for the page, for the 
stanza, even for the line, which is not alive to this 
day with the very soul of Elizabethan music. Such 
mastery of language, turning into deathless beauty 
words and phrases which had seemed fit only for 
humdrum use, English had never before approached; 



26 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

and that mastery has never been surpassed. Indeed, 
one can hardly imagine that it ever will be. 

Yet, as one grows even slightly familiar with Spen- 
ser's whole work, one begins to perceive in it, besides 
his permanent characteristics, features which mark 
him as historically Elizabethan. There are traces left 
of his early experimental theories — the vestiges of the 
"Areopagus," for example, and the surviving bits of his 
correspondence with Gabriel Harvey. In the "Shep- 
herd's Calendar," he avowedly attempts a great many 
literary experiments, bolder, more free, more com- 
prehensive than those which appeared in Sidney's 
"Arcadia," but obviously of the same school. If 
one were disposed to doubt whether Spenser could 
possibly be literal, his "View of the State of Ireland" 
would set doubt at rest; though cast in the now obso- 
letely conventional form of a pseudo-classic dialogue, 
it states plain facts with uncompromising precision. 
Yet, when Spenser attempted to treat fact in poetry, 
he began by elaborately conventionalizing it. In his 
elegy on Sir Philip Sidney — "Astrophel," he calls it — 
he describes his dead patron as a shepherd; and he 
sets forth the death which he so deeply laments as 
resulting from the bite of a boar, which involved phys- 
ical details identical with those under which poor 
Sidney lay suffering after that mortal wound at Zut- 
phen. In "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," Spenser 
pleasantly records his obligations to Sir Walter Ral- 
egh; and, by way of intimating that at one time they 
read their verses to each other, he tells us that when 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 27 

the Shepherd of the Ocean came to visit Colin Clout, 
one piped while the other sang, and presently, when 
the first took to singing, the second piped in turn. 
Spenser belonged, in short, to a time which could 
not imagine a treatment of fact to be poetic unless 
that treatment should distort fact into some lifeless 
likeness of conventional and civilized fiction. 

The "Faerie Queene" itself, indeed, if one neglect 
for a while the wonderful mastery of its diction, has 
a rather archaic aspect. "The general end of all the 
book," the preface tells us, was "to fashion a gentle- 
man or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." 
Spenser seems to have intended that the poem should 
be practically didactic — should help people to behave 
themselves properly. Yet, instead of proceeding to 
dreary aphorisms, he instantly loses himself in the 
melodious mazes of his confused and misty allegory. 
The principles which animated him may have been 
almost as beautiful as the lines he came to write so 
freely; but what these principles were, no unaided 
reader could ever guess, and the few who have had 
the patience to puzzle them out have not been per- 
ceptibly influenced by them in point of conduct. As 
a didactic poem, the "Faerie Queene" is almost com- 
ically inefficient. For which circumstance we may be 
duly thankful; for no didactic poem has ever yet been 
such a thing of beauty as is this first truly great 
achievement of formal Elizabethan experiment. 

Yet, great as Spenser is, his greatness lacks the 
ultimate virtue of simplicity. It chances that the last 



28 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

two stanzas of the "Faerie Queene" — the fragment 
which is called "imperfite" — express, in beautifully 
tentative verse, a feeling which had earlier been 
summed up, in a deathless line, by one of the three 
or four poets throughout all literature who are 
supremely great. Here are Spenser's verses — verses 
in which one can almost feel a consciousness that all 
this experiment of his was, at best, only experiment 
still: 

When I bethink me of that speech whyleare, 

Of Mutabilitie, and well it weigh, 
Meseems that though she all unworthy were 

Of the Heavens' Rule, yet very sooth to say 

In all things else she bears the greatest sway; 
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, 

And love of things so vain to cast away, 
Whose flowering pride, so fading and so fickle, 
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. 

Then 'gin I think on that which Nature said 

Of that same time when no more change shall be, 
But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stayed 

Upon the pillars of Eternity, 

Which is contrayr to Mutabilitie; 
For all that moveth doth in Change delight, 

But henceforth all shall rest eternally 
With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight. 
O, thou great Sabaoth God, grant me that sabbath's sight. 

And here is the single line in which Dante summar- 
ized forever the thought for which Spenser seems to 
have been groping: 

In la sua voluntade e nostra pace. 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 29 

"In His will is our peace," it means literally; but 
no translation can even shadow forth the full meaning 
which Dante compressed into the marvellous sound 
and rhythm of his supreme phrase. The contrast 
between that line of Dante's and those two stanzas 
of Spenser's tells the whole story of two literary 
epochs. If others can feel that contrast as I feel it, 
we need dwell no more on the difference between 
untiring enthusiasm of experiment and the serene cer- 
tainty of mastery. 

No doubt Elizabethan literature had countless other 
aspects than this experimental one, on which we have 
dwelt so long. Yet, for our purpose, this seems to 
me the most important, the most significant of temper. 
For, if one reflect a moment, one cannot doubt that 
the nation which welcomed such varied, such shifting, 
such spontaneous work as we have glanced at was 
a nation both passionately eager for novelty and so 
alert in perception as to notice with unthinking de- 
light even verbal novelties — a nation, too, blest for 
the while with the rare power of delighting not only 
in novelty but also in beauty. It is only when this 
impression of the Elizabethan public grows distinct 
that one can begin to understand the greatest phase 
of Elizabethan literature — the drama, which so swiftly 
developed during the last few years of the sixteenth 
century. When Sidney's "Defence of Poesie" was 
written, the English drama, as we know it now, had 
hardly come into existence. When the seventeenth 



3 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

century began, fifteen years later, Shakspere's work 
was half done. 

Supremely as he has now emerged above all other 
modern poets, Shakspere was historically an Eliza- 
bethan playwright ; and as the facts of his career grow 
distinct, there seems nothing in them more wonderful 
than that, in spite of his magnitude, his development 
was so normal. So normal, too, was the development 
of the drama in his time that one is apt to choose its 
history as the most complete recorded example of the 
natural law which governs the growth, the flourish, 
and the decline of schools of art. One grows, indeed, 
to think of the Elizabethan drama as if it were an 
organism, as distinct and palpable as some physical 
body; and of Shakspere's work, which comes, both 
chronologically and substantially, in the very midst 
of its brief, intense life, as the single concrete fact 
from which its whole history might be inferred. 

Like all other schools of fine art, this Elizabethan 
drama had its origin in immemorial convention. Long 
before the Renaissance or the Reformation had begun 
to stir England, certain popular dramatic practices had 
existed there. Among the earliest were the Miracle 
plays, in which Scriptural stories, with much gro- 
tesque interlude, were enacted, on Church festivals, 
by the guilds of various towns. A little later came 
less elaborate Moralities, in which personified Virtues 
and Vices stalked through didactic conventionalities. 
About the same time came traces of more popular in- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 31 

terludes, such as that grotesque "Masque of the Wor- 
thies" which enlivens the tedious length of "Love's La- 
bour's Lost." When this kind of archaic drama was at 
its trivial best, the Renaissance had more than dawned, 
and scholarly people were trying to impose on Eng- 
land, just as they successfully tried to impose on Italy 
and on France, the dogmatic conventions which they 
believed to have controlled the inherently excellent 
dramas of antiquity. "Gorboduc," the first printed 
English tragedy, commended itself to the taste of 
Sidney because it is drearily Senecan in form. "Ralph 
Roister Doister" and "Gammer Gurton's Needle," 
commonly thought of as our earliest printed comedies, 
are closely modelled on Plautus and Terence. Yet 
all three are English in substance. "Gorboduc" trans- 
lates into dramatic form just such a legendary chroni- 
cle of national history as Shakspere, a generation 
later, translated into "Lear" and "Macbeth." "Ralph 
Roister Doister" is full of such horse-play as boister- 
ously delighted the spectators of miracles and inter- 
ludes; and "Gammer Gurton's Needle," for all its 
classic form, tells a rudely comic story which might 
have come straight from some of Chaucer's more hum- 
ble characters — the Miller or the Wife of Bath. Even 
this most classic phase of the English drama was not 
contentedly obedient to the spirit of classicism; and, 
by the time of Sidney's "Defence of Poesie," the popu- 
lar theatre had sprung into a wildly romantic luxuri- 
ance, of which he gently and fruitlessly expounded 



32 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

what seemed to him the errors. A very little later 
came some plays in which the two spirits were fused 
— the comedies of Lily, which succeeded his "Eu- 
phues." 

Lily's plays resemble his novels. They have little 
permanent merit; but their inexhaustible ingenuity of 
situation and of phrase prove him once more a master 
of novelty. He instinctively knew his public; and he 
had that shallow kind of originality which enables 
men to do for the first time things which abler men 
shall by and by do better. He wrote mostly for the 
companies of child-actors who were gathered for vari- 
ous purposes of public performance in the choirs of 
the Royal Chapel and of St. Paul's. He took his 
plots mostly from the classics, then so newly revived 
that classical stories were for a while once more a 
source not of tears but of joy. He set forth these 
stories with all the structural freedom permitted by 
the rude dramatic traditions of native England. And 
he graced his extravagances of structure with a dia- 
logue as ingeniously unexpected and polished in its 
turns as was the already popular style of his "Eu- 
phues." Up to this time there may have been doubt 
whether the growing English drama should take a 
classic or a romantic form. The popular romanticism 
of Lily virtually settled the question. The romantic 
drama was not only to be popular; it was to be a mat- 
ter of fashion as well. 

Meanwhile, with the establishment of regular thea- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 33 

tres, there had arisen a school of popular playwrights 
whose business was to supply, on short demand, plays 
which should please the general public. Scapegraces 
from the universities, as a rule, these careless poets — 
whom even the extensive charity of that pristine time 
held hardly fit for holy orders — went to wretched ends 
in such taverns as Shakspere shows us in Henry IV. 
At least one of them — Marlowe, by far the most 
gifted — left fragments of imaginative poetry, inter- 
spersed in worthless stuff, which make the squalid 
story of his premature death more tragic than any of 
those he set forth. And the very inequality of his care- 
less work, vivified by the occasional flashes of his 
genius, throws light on its true character. Nowadays 
a playright is generally expected either to invent his 
plot, or frankly to announce that he has adapted the 
work of some one else, who proceeds to claim share 
in the copyright. Elizabethan playwrights never 
dreamed of such refinements. In the literature which 
which was springing up about them, particularly in 
chronicles and translations, they found plenty of inter- 
esting stories. These they took for their material, 
translating them, or what parts of them they chanced ■ 
to fancy, into terms of dialogue and action. And 
thus translating, rather than in any sense creating, 
they found their wits free to make lovely novelties of 
phrase — like the novelties which had assured the 
popularity of Lily, and Sidney, and Spenser. 

By the time when Shakspere came to London — Mr. 



34 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Sidney Lee believes that he came in 1586 — these reck- 
less old translators of tales into dramas had begun to 
develop several varieties of play, which modern criti- 
cism has chosen to classify. The most characteristic 
was the chronicle history, a frank translation into 
dramatic terms of passages, usually covering whole 
reigns, from such contemporary chroniclers as Stowe 
or Holinshed. Chronicle histories made no pretence 
to dramatic coherence or unity; but people who sat 
through them came away satisfied with rant, pagean- 
try, and a misty idea that they had agreeably acquired 
historical information. Another kind of play, which 
was not always quite distinct, was the tragedy of 
blood — or better, of blood and thunder, as we should 
say to-day. These tragedies translated into dramatic 
form the most wildly sensational tales of battle, mur- 
der, sudden death, and madness which their authors 
could discover in the crude fictions of chap-books or 
wherever else. Chronicle history ripened into Mar- 
lowe's masterpiece — "Edward II." The tragedy of 
blood appears most distinctly in the work of Kyd. 
Lily, as we have seen already, was making ingeniously 
graceful comedies at the same time. And there was 
another kind of more broadly romantic comedy, of 
which one finds traces in the work of Greene and of 
Peele. 

The very mention of these names suggests another 
fact, which was true of all the old playwrights. These 
hasty translators of narrative into drama were so apt 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 35 

to work in careless collaboration that you can hardly 
ever feel sure that any given scene of the period is 
all by one hand. What you can assert is that all 
of them alike seem animated by the same experi- 
mental spirit which animated the more serious and 
more respectable literature of their time; that all 
were addressing a public enthusiastically eager for 
novelty; and that each seemed able to provide some 
novelty of a faintly specific kind. Marlowe was at 
once sensational and nobly imaginative; Kyd was so 
boldly sensational that no one stopped to remark his 
dulness of imagination; Lily scintillated with pretty 
ingenuities ; Greene and Peele were freely, volubly 
romantic. All alike were purveyors of novelty to a 
public which craved it. All alike were men of a 
period, of a moment whose more formal literature was 
alive with a spirit of enthusiastic experiment. 

To understand Shakspere, we must keep this spirit 
and these facts in mind. Once for all, of course, we 
must admit the mystery of his genius; we must grant 
his ineffable power of creating things which have im- 
mortally survived the human conditions of their crea- 
tion. But we need not fall into the superstition of 
supposing that in his own time he could have seemed 
superhuman. Uncertain as literary chronology re- 
mains, enough is known to prove the chief facts of 
his personal and artistic history. He came to London 
when the first school of English playwrights — the 
school at which we have glanced — had just begun to 



36 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

display its powers and its limits. He made himself 
one of them. The others soon died : Greene, for ex- 
ample, came to a miserable end in 1592; a year later, 
Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl. Shakspere 
lived on, for a while almost the only survivor of this 
early time. Then, after a few years, a new and far 
more sophisticated school of playwrights arose. With 
these, as with the earlier school, Shakspere was con- 
temporary; and he was the only one of the Elizabethan 
dramatists whose career thus chanced to cover the 
two distinct periods of the drama — that of its rise 
and that of its decline. Again, the better one knows 
his surroundings, the more clearly one begins to per- 
ceive that his chief peculiarity, when compared with 
his contemporaries, was a somewhat sluggish avoid- 
ance of needless invention. When anyone else had 
done a popular thing, Shakspere was pretty sure to 
imitate him and to do it better. But he hardly ever 
did anything first. To his contemporaries he must 
have seemed deficient in originality, at least as com- 
pared with Lily, or Marlowe, or Ben Jonson, or Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. He was the most obviously imi- 
tative dramatist of all — following rather than leading 
superficial fashion. And so his work now appears to 
be the most versatile of all; his imitative variety is so 
comprehensive, indeed, that one can illustrate from 
Shakspere alone the whole history of dramatic litera- 
ture during the twenty-five years of his creative life. 
This imitativeness of Shakspere's — his comparative 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 37 

lack of superficial originality — is most obvious in his 
earlier work. His first recorded publication, "Venus 
and Adonis," which appeared during the year when 
Marlowe was killed, is certainly the best example in 
English of its peculiar kind of versified narrative. 
With equal certainty, there were already in our lan- 
guage a number of these free metrical versions of clas- 
sical stories, glowing with such temper as one feels be- 
neath the pagan canvases of Titian. Before this time 
Shakspere had certainly done years of work as a 
dramatic hack-writer for the popular theatres; and 
there is fair reason to believe that he had already 
written "Love's Labour's Lost," "Henry VI.," "Titus 
Andronicus," the "Comedy of Errors," and the "Two 
Gentlemen of Verona." None of these resembles 
"Venus and Adonis" ; what is more, none is much like 
any of the others ; but each has much in common with 
popular work already set forth by somebody else. 
"Love's Labour's Lost" is obviously in the manner 
of Lily. "Henry VI.," certainty collaborative but 
certainly too vivified by true Shaksperian touches, is 
a chronicle history of the earlier kind : Greene and 
Peele were the chief makers of such plays until Mar- 
lowe developed the type into his almost masterly 
"Edward II." "Titus Andronicus," so often repudi- 
ated by sentimental people as unworthy, but surely 
attributed to Shakspere during his lifetime, is a trag- 
edy of blood, much in the manner of Kyd. The 
"Comedy of Errors" adapts for popular presentation 



38 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

a familiar kind of Latin comedy. The "Two Gentle- 
men of Verona" is an experiment in the sort of 
romantic comedy which Shakspere soon made more 
his own than any other form of drama. The real 
nature of Shakspere's power begins to appear. He 
was by far the most versatile dramatist of all. If 
he rarely did anything for the first time, he tried his 
hand at almost everything which anyone else had 
attempted; and he did almost everything better than 
it had been done before. Yet, after six or seven 
years of work, he had hardly written a page which 
fully indicated the power which was in him. 

Except as a phrase-maker. Each of these plays, 
and "Venus and Adonis," too, contains, one may con- 
fidently say, a greater number of admirable and beau- 
tiful detached phrases than are to be found in any 
work of equal length by any of his contemporaries. 
No fact could go much further to show how normally 
Elizabethan his early temper was. Those years were 
years when the whole world — not only the dramatists 
but the poets and the writers of ingenious prose as 
well — were enthusiastically playing with words, eager 
to discover every effect of which our newly tamed 
language was gracefully capable. And Shakspere's 
phrases have proved more memorable than the rest 
only because his mind chanced to be of that rare kind 

(in which words and concepts seem almost identical.\ 
When other men juggled with words, he unwittingly 
juggled with ideas as well; so where others only 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 39 

punned he unwittingly intermingled astonishing vari- 
eties of thought. This fact, however, no contemporary 
could have known; to be assured of wisdom, a phrase 
must stand the test of the centuries. In his own time, 
accordingly, Shakspere must have begun by seeming 
chiefly noteworthy as the most versatile among count- 
less nimble makers of phrase. 

And then followed the few years when the elder 
playwrights were dead, and the later had hardly begun 
their work; the years when Shakspere was virtually 
alone. Broadly speaking, these were the years be- 
tween the death of Marlowe, in 1593, and that of 
Spenser, in 1599. In 1600 an exceptional number 
of quartos attested how popular Shakspere had be- 
come meanwhile. He did so much, and what he did 
was so extraordinary, that we have no choice left us 
but to speed over the story. In brief, he brought 
tragedy to the point of "Romeo and Juliet," where for 
a while he left it. He developed chronicle history 
through the successive stages of "Richard III.," 
"Richard II.," and "King John," until, in "Henry 
IV." and "Henry V.," he virtually invented a new 
kind of literature — historical fiction. He awakened 
comedy into the fantasy of the "Midsummer Night's 
Dream" ; he carried it through the glowing romance 
of the "Merchant of Venice" ; and he brought it to 
the complete maturity of "Much Ado About Nothing," 
"As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night." Meanwhile, 
he had surely written some of his sonnets. Mr. Sidney 



4 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Lee, indeed, the most authoritative of recent critics, 
refers all the sonnets to an earlier period still. 

This second period of Shakspere's work proves, like 
the first, varied, versatile, in some degree experimental. 
The difference lies in the kindling force of his imag- 
ination. This has finally passed beyond the stage of 
phrase-making; it has breathed life into character after 
character who have proved immortal — Romeo, Juliet, 
and Mercutio; Shylock and Portia; Falstaff; Bene- 
dick and Beatrice, and the rest. It has developed into 
full vitality what had previously been the archaic con- 
ventions of chronicle history and of romantic comedy. 
It has made the greatest known tragedy of youthful 
love. It has been able to suffuse each separate work 
of its creation with an atmosphere as distinct as those 
we breathe in separate regions of actual earth. And, 
if the Sonnets truly belong here, it has achieved the 
highest work of that elaborately artificial literary 
fashion which Wyatt and Surrey started and which 
Sidney made permanent. 

Whether Shakspere's sonnets are autobiographic or 
mere feats of rhetoric, one thing is surely true of them. 
They imitated approved models; they followed the 
fashion, and did not lead it. Taken quite by them- 
selves, as modern readers are apt to take them, they 
may well seem the key with which the poet unlocked 
his heart. If so, "the less Shakspere he." For, taken 
in their relation to the hundreds of sonnets which 
enriched English between 1590 and 1600, they seem 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 41 

little else than another piece of conclusive proof that 
what other men had done well, Shakspere could al- 
ways do better. 

The subject-matter of the sonnets, like that of all 
Elizabethan sequences, is love — the varying moods 
through which aTover is bound to pass. And love, 
when set forth by one who even pretends to be an 
earnest lover, is bound to seem serious. Serious, too, 
must seem the utterances of emotion and the develop- 
ments of character in any drama or other fiction which 
attains the excellence of lasting vitality. So, indeed, 
must aphorism and other mere turns of phrase, if the 
phrase-maker, while ingeniously juggling with words, 
has even unwittingly mingled with those words con- 
cepts which accidentally combine in pregnancy of 
thought. It is no wonder that if Shakspere had never 
written another line than those at which we have 
glanced, he would have seemed to half mankind not 
only an eminent dramatist and poet, but also a weighty 
philosopher. Yet it does not follow that he meant 
to be one, or even suspected that anyone could think 
him so. 

We must grant, to begin with, the mystery of his 
genius. We must grant that to him, more than to 
any other man who has written our language, words 
and concepts were almost identical. We must grant 
that the slow but constant kindling of his imaginative 
power had begun so to glow that he could not help 
wakening to life the stiffly conventional characters 



42 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which he found, as little more than names, in the tales 
and the fictions he adapted for the stage. We must 
grant, too, that by this time his imagination could not 
help suffusing each new drama with a subtle, unmis- 
takable atmosphere of its own. And we must remem- 
ber that he came to the fulness of his power at the mo- 
ment when that wonderful Elizabethan world was in 
the very heyday of its enthusiastic experiment. Grant- 
ing and remembering all this, we can hardly fail to see 
that even though he worked with no deeper conscious 
purpose than an effort to do more effectively things 
which other men had already done well, he would 
probably have produced just such results as we have 
the happiness to possess. This explanation of him 
is the simplest. To seek in him for more, to fancy 
him a deliberate philosopher or teacher, seems wanton 
disregard of the principle that what may be rationally 
explained need not be held a miracle. 

Thus considered, Shakspere, in 1600, seems some- 
thing more than our supreme poet. He proves to be 
also a man of his time — an Elizabethan. And, again 
and again, the qualities which the fact of his survival 
have made so many of us fancy peculiar to him 
prove qualities which we have found in the work of 
the fading dramatists and poets who, in his own time, 
seemed living as steadily as he. By a happy chance, 
his career fell in the very midst of the epoch whose 
meaning his works express. Besides his essential 
greatness, then, he chances actually to be the one 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 43 

Elizabethan poet in whose work we may most surely 
feel the full national temper of his time. 

That national temper — the character of England 
when the seventeenth century began — is what we are 
attempting to perceive together. It is hard to define, 
yet not hard to know. We have seen enough, even 
in this hasty glance, to remind ourselves of its most 
certain feature — a momentary national integrity. 
Elizabethans, like all other men, differed among them- 
selves; but their England was a world where, for a 
little while, one can feel first the characteristics which 
men have in common and only afterward those which 
distinguish them apart from one another. The 
makers of lyric poems, the workers in our elder prose, 
and Lily, and Sidney, and Spenser, and the dramatists, 
and even Shakspere himself, were first of all men of 
that eager, buoyant time, remembered still in tradition 
as the heroic age of England. 

And the quality of English character in that vigor- 
ous elder integrity has a sort of youthful ardor which 
suffuses every phase of its expression. In life as in 
letters, those years were years of exploration, of ex- 
periment, of spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile eager- 
ness to discover the mysteries which lurked, wherever 
the bodies or the souls of men might stray, beyond 
the bounds of the horizon. 

On the coins of old Spain there is a device which 
comes to mind whenever I try to define this spirit. 
The shield of Castile and Leon was supported by two 



44 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

columns — the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar and the 
Moorish hill across the Strait, which marked the limit 
of the Old World. But the motto speaks of no limit. 
"Plus Ultra," it runs — there is more beyond. And 
what that more might be no man could know. So 
forth they went in search of El Dorado, and of the 
fountains of Eternal Youth, coasting and spying, 
among the rest, that continent, now ours, which the 
centuries have shown to be the destined nursery of 
English-speaking democracy. 

"Plus Ultra" seems the motto best fitting Eliza- 
bethan literature, when the seventeenth century began. 
Fifty years before, the language of England was still 
untamed ; even twelve years before, when the Armada 
was cleared from the Channel, English literature had 
hardly commenced flourishing. Now, eager experiment, 
eagerly welcomed, had proved our English not only 
a lastingly efficient vehicle of record and of reason. 
It had asserted for English a lyric power unsurpassed 
by that of any other tongue. It had shown that the 
English language could be made the instrument of 
civilized literature. Above all, this eager experi- 
ment had awakened into being a new kind of drama, 
more varied and more flexible than any known before, 
and hardly less lofty than the very Greek. And all 
this had been summarized and typified in the early 
career of Shakspere, still doing better and better. 
Wherever he had approached the limits of literature, 
these limits had receded, as mists fade before a morn- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 45 

ing sun. There were no Pillars of Hercules left, 
except as a gate into the unexplored wealth and mys- 
teries of the world beyond. And what lay there no 
man could tell, or stopped for the while to guess. 
All pressed on. 

Our task henceforth will be to trace the way in 
which new limitations closed about them. Shakspere 
himself felt a check, long before his end. And after 
his time came more changes and more; these we are 
to consider together by and by. But now, we need 
look no further than we have gone. When the sev- 
enteenth century began, "Plus Ultra" seemed a fit 
motto for all the national temper of England: there 
was more beyond. 



II 

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE DRAMA. 

When the seventeenth century began, we have seen, 
the national temper of England, as expressed in lit- 
erature, was enthusiastic, spontaneous, and versatile. 
More clearly still — when we hastily traced the outburst 
of lyric poetry, the growth .of serviceable prose, the 
literary fantasies and achievements of Lily, of Sidney, 
and of Spenser, and, above all, the development of the 
drama into the full ripeness of Shakspere's chronicle 
histories and comedies — we found that national tem- 
per integral. For all their differences, every one of 
the Elizabethan poets and writers — even to Shakspere 
himself — seemed adventurously experimental. "Plus 
Ultra" seemed the motto for those buoyant days; be- 
yond the Pillars of Hercules there was more than any 
voyager into strange seas of thought could know be- 
forehand. 

Henceforth our effort will be to trace the changes 
in this national temper, until — a century later — Eng- 
land, at least in its literary expression, had become 
so different from that elder Elizabethan world — an 
elder world from which not only modern England, 
but modern America, too, can surely trace its origin. 

4 6 



THE DRAMA 47 

And first, we shall consider what happened to the 
two forms of literature which, in 1600, had reached 
the highest development — lyric poetry and the drama. 

We may best consider them separately. Within half 
a century each had changed conspicuously. Both had 
disintegrated ; but while lyric verse still flourished dis- 
inteprajl y, the drama had declined. And even had 
their courses been more nearly parallel, there would 
be reason why we should first attend to the drama 
by itself. For, as I hastily said when we first turned 
to it, the history of the English drama from its awak- 
ening under Elizabeth to its extinction under Charles 
I. affords a remarkably clear and typical example of 
literary evolution. By studying its course, we may 
discover more than its mere history; we may perceive 
how any school of art — Greek sculpture, if you like, 
Gothic architecture, Florentine or Venetian painting 
— rises, flourishes, and decays. 

In brief, whatever school of human expression is 
destined to reach vitality originates from certain fixed, 
immemorial conventions rather blindly followed in a 
manner which we may broadly call archaic. The 
painted statues which excavation has restored to light 
in the Museum of the Acropolis are examples of this ; 
so are the mosaics of Ravenna or of St. Mark's; so 
are the English miracle plays and moralities. To a 
people long bound by such archaic convention comes 
an impulse, no doubt traceable to external forces, but 
known to themselves chiefly, if not only, as freshened 



48 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

imaginative activity. They suddenly feel, they seem 
instinctively to perceive, how things may be altered 
in the direction of truth and beauty. When such im- 
pulse comes, it seems for a while illimitable; there 
seems no reason why achievement should not advance 
forever, stronger and nobler with each new effort. So 
the art, whatever it is, surges ahead — often wildly and 
luxuriantly, in great degree abortively, in some degree 
immortally. Then, by and by, comes an insidious 
sense of the limits which human conditions and human 
powers must always impose on humanity. No tower 
based on earth can ever soar to the true heavens; at 
best it can only lift its summit a little higher heaven- 
ward. So a benumbing sense of fact begins inex- 
orably to check the imaginative impulse which a little 
while before burst so irresistibly from the bonds of 
old conventions; and in new conventional traditions, 
in contented or restless consciousness of limitation, 
the art declines into a new lifelessness. 

There are many moods, accordingly, in which one 
is disposed to think of human expression much as one 
thinks of physical phenomena throughout the living 
world. Wildly various and strong and individual as 
these may seem, they prove, in truth, nothing more 
various or individual than cumulative examples of 
how those great forces work which we begin to rec- 
ognize as natural law. When we take whatever frag- 
ment we like from the beautiful, confused intricacy of 
nature, and study its parts in their relations, we find 



THE DRAMA 49 

slowly growing in our minds an image of such death- 
less, inexorable order as the mere contemplation of 
fact at any given moment could never reveal. As- 
tronomy has thus emerged into colossal truth; geol- 
ogy, too; physics is following; biology and all the 
human facts which we may include within it stand 
ready for deathless words which shall flash newer and 
ever newer cosmic order into the midst of receding 
chaos. And even we students of literature cannot, 
and should not, resist that truest imaginative impulse 
of our own time ; we should ourselves be anachronisms 
if we were content only to enjoy the splendidly con- 
fused creations of the art we love — if we did not 
eagerly strive to perceive and to define the relations 
in which they really stand to one another. 

In fine art, as in all Nature else, phenomena appear 
inextricably intermingled. The simplicity of labora- 
tories is magnificently artificial. The order of law, 
as we can state it, is never the same as the aspect 
of fact. So accidents of chronology rarely combine 
with accidents of expression to define such generali- 
zations as I have just tried to suggest. In the case of 
the Elizabethan drama, they come near doing so. 
The uncertainties of date which still confuse the mi- 
nute history of this school of literature do not confuse 
its outline. We need hardly lament longer that such 
uncertainties persist. Rather we may count ourselves 
fortunate to possess two passages, so definitely fixed 
as to be trustworthy in date, and so unmistakably 



5o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

phrased as to afford remarkable examples of how 
imagination breaks the limits of old conventions, and 
of how, after the brief period when imagination and 
sense of fact have been immortally fused, a crush- 
ing sense of fact slowly and inexorably checks the 
further aspirations of imagination, imposing new con- 
ventions on an art which is no longer free. 

Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," published in 1590, was 
probably acted at just about the time when Shakespere 
came to London. Among other things, it is believed 
finally to have made popular and inevitable on our 
stage the blank verse in which our lasting dramatic 
works were phrased. Whether the prologue was 
written before the play was published, nobody knows ; 
but it was surely published in 1590, before Shakspere 
had emerged from the experiments of what has been 
called his apprenticeship ; and here it is : 

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war. 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threatening the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 
View but his picture in this tragic glass, 
And then applaud his fortunes as you please. 

If no other words of Marlowe's were left us, 
these would tell what Jonson meant when he wrote of 
"Marlowe's mighty line" ; they would express, too, 
that spirit of imaginative aspiration, bursting the bonds 



THE DRAMA 51 

of convention, which breathes throughout Marlowe's 
fragmentary and colossal work. Twenty-two years 
after this prologue was published — perhaps twenty-five 
after it was written — there w r as published, in turn, 
the first complete work of John Webster, the "White 
Devil." The year in which this was printed, 1612, 
coincides with the close of Shakspere's career even 
more closely than that in which "Tamburlaine" was 
probably written coincides with its beginning. Shak- 
spere began his work just when Marlowe broke the 
shackles of old conventions, and ended it just before 
John Webster prefaced his first play with the follow- 
ing words : 

"Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance: for 
mine own part, I have ever truly cherished my good 
opinion of other men's worthy labours; especially of 
that full and heightened style of Master Chapman ; the 
laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson; 
the no less worthy composures of the both worthily 
excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher; and 
lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right 
happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, 
Master Dekker, and Master Heywood; wishing what 
I write may be read by their light; protesting that, in 
the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so 
worthy, that though I rest silent in my own work, 
yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix 
that of Martial, 

— non norunt haec monumenta mori." 



52 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

You shall search literature far and wide for a more 
concrete statement of how a limiting sense of fact 
benumbs into new conventionality a school of art 
which has become consciously aware that it must obey 
tradition. Marlowe speaks of old, enfeebled, broken 
bonds; Webster of those bonds with which the giants 
themselves replaced the ancient ones they had splen- 
didly disdained. 

And so back to Shakspere. Webster thought him 
only one of many dramatic poets ; to us he has emerged 
supreme. Of the playwrights living in 1612, and 
mentioned by Webster as his masters, Shakspere, in 
point of publication, was the eldest. When we last 
considered him, in 1600, his work consisted of his 
histories, his comedies, "Romeo and Juliet," and per- 
haps the Sonnets. Now, in 16 12, his career was 
finished. That very statement is enough to remind 
us of what he had accomplished during the first twelve 
years of the seventeenth century. He had produced 
"Julius Caesar," "Measure for Measure," the four 
great tragedies, "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Cori- 
olanus"; then, perhaps after a brief collaborative in- 
terval, to which "Timon" and "Pericles" are attrib- 
uted, he had made his three great romances — "Cym- 
beline," the "Tempest," and the "Winter's Tale"; 
finally he had done his collaborative part, whatever 
it was, in "Henry VIII." ; so an end. Here is matter 
enough for a lifetime of conferences like ours. In 
this glance at the latter half of Shakspere's work, we 



THE DRAMA 53 

must neglect all detail and generalize with what may 
well seem bewildering swiftness. 

These works of Shakspere clearly divide themselves 
into two groups, different from each other and still 
more different from what he had written before. 
Broadly speaking, we may call the first group tragic 
and the second romantic. In the tragic group, there 
is little trace left of the robust cheerfulness which 
marked his histories and his comedies. Instead we 
have a crescent emphasis on three distinct, though 
intermingled, phases of inexorable tragic fact : the 
irony of fate, the mischief women can work, and the 
horrors of madness. Meanwhile his style, the texture 
of his verse, slowly intensifies. From the beginning 
his words had been charged with concepts beyond 
the words of other men. Now, his thought grows 
overwhelming, sometimes to the point of distortion, 
finally to what approaches obscurity. It is as if the 
marriage of word and meaning in his mind were 
growing old — as if meaning were enforcing its con- 
trol more and more, like some powerful mate who 
proves at last the dominant partner in what once 
seemed equal wedlock. There was more beauty, 
perhaps, in the elder time; now there is inestimably 
more power and passion and significance. 

Then, if we may trust our conjectural chronology, 
comes a sudden cessation of power — in "Coriolanus," 
what seems a colossal chill of exhaustion ; in "Timon" 
and "Pericles" something like momentary impotence. 



54 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Finally, in the three romances, comes a new temper 
and a new manner. Comedy and tragedy are finally 
fused. Things go ill for a while, but tend to happy 
ends. As the "Tempest" clears, the ideal world where 
it has played its mimic life is suffused with the radi- 
ance of an ideal philosophy. The verse, meanwhile, 
still overcharged with meaning, grows so flexibly in- 
formal under the weight thereof that if you playfully 
read it aloud as prose, he must have a fine ear who 
should detect your prank. I touch on this merely 
technical matter because, in itself, it is strongly typical 
of artistic decline. Marlowe, with his mighty line, 
broke away from the "jigging veins" of the careless 
old playwrights. Then, for a while, blank verse, with 
growing elasticity, seemed eternally able to sustain 
any burden of significance which the poets would have 
it bear. By and by it began to bend under the tasks 
imposed on it. By Webster's time it had left the 
jigging veins far behind; but at that same time its 
vigor and outburst had subsided into something little 
different from the daily speech of men. For the while 
blank verse had reached its limits. As it struggled 
against them, its sustaining power weakened, its surg- 
ing spirit seemed almost broken. 

But all this should not distract us from our chief 
question now; namely, what we may best believe the 
double change in Shakspere's utterances to signify. 
From a buoyant poet he became a tragic, and finally 
a romantic. The first impulse of critics who recog- 



THE DRAMA 55 

nized this course of his development was to believe 
it due to his own spiritual experience. Without 
question it may thus be explained. Suppose, for ex- 
ample, that, unwelcomely married at Stratford, he 
came to London, and made his way there, and met 
some woman of higher rank than he had known be- 
fore, and fell in love with her; that he found her 
faithless, and suffered accordingly; and finally that he 
surmounted the suffering. Then consider some of his 
heroines — Juliet, Portia, Beatrice ; the haunting doubts 
about Hero ; the dark lady of the Sonnets ; Ophelia, 
Cressida, Desdemona; the daughters of Lear; Lady 
Macbeth ; and Cleopatra. Here are keys, it might seem, 
with which he unlocked chamber after chamber of 
his heart. And then came Imogen, and Miranda, and 
Perdita, like the glowing rays of some serene sunset. 
Whatever the truth, there is hardly anywhere a more 
consistent expression of the stages through which a 
lover passes who yields himself reverently to the fas- 
cination of a woman; who finds her, after a while, an 
object of doubt; who then has the agony to know her 
certainly unworthy; yet who ends by rising from the 
depths in which all this misery has plunged him, and 
by finding consolation in charity and in self-mastery. 
All of which conjectural story hangs upon the auto- 
biographic truth of those sonnets about the reprehen- 
sible lady with dark hair. 

Mr. Sidney Lee, as we saw, has finally demonstrated 
how unlikely it is that these sonnets have personal 



56 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

origin. At least it is certain that they admirably 
follow, and develop into excellence, a literary form 
which other men had not long before made the 
fashion. There is no need to assume that they re- 
veal a new Shakspere. They are explicable if we 
regard him still as that supremely imitative man of 
letters whose experimental work had proved him so 
versatile; whose impulse, from the beginning, had 
been not to express himself — if, indeed, he had any 
conscious self to express — but only to do incomparably 
better things which more adventurously original men 
had already done well. 

A young American scholar whose name has hardly 
yet crossed the Atlantic — Professor Ashley Horace 
Thorndike — has lately made some studies in dra- 
matic chronology which go far to confirm the un- 
romantic conjecture that to the end Shakspere re- 
mained imitative, and little else. Professor Thorn- 
dike, for example, has shown with convincing proba- 
bility that certain old plays concerning Robin Hood 
proved popular; a little later, Shakspere produced the 
woods and the outlaws of "As You Like It." The 
question is one of pure chronology; and pure chronol- 
ogy has convinced me, for one, that the forest scenes 
of Arden were written to fit available costumes and 
properties — that the green raiment of the banished 
duke was an Elizabethan prototype of the tubs of 
Mr. Vincent Crummies. Again, Professor Thorndike 
has shown that Roman subjects grew popular, and 



THE DRAMA 57 

tragedies of revenge, such as Marston's; a little later 
Shakspere wrote "Julius Caesar" and "Hamlet." 
With much more elaboration, Professor Thorndike 
has virtually proved that the romances of Beaumont 
and Fletcher — different both in motive and in style 
from any popular plays which had preceded them — 
were conspicuously successful on the London stage 
before Shakspere began to write romances. It seems 
likely, therefore, that "Cymbeline," which less careful 
chronology had conjectured to be a model for Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, was, in fact, imitated from models 
which they had made. In other words, Professor 
Thorndike has shown that we may account for all the 
changes in Shakspere, after 1600, by merely assuming 
that the most skilful and instinctive imitator among 
the early Elizabethan dramatists remained till the end 
an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by 
others. 

Incomparably more simple I find this explanation 
than the old, romantic one; and incomparably more 
significant, as well, to anyone who has been perplexed 
to know why Shakspere's work, arranged in chrono- 
logic order, proves so broadly typical of literary evo- 
lution. If we clearly understand that he chanced to 
live at a time when the Elizabethan drama passed 
through almost its whole course from "Tamburlaine" 
to the "White Devil" ; and if we admit that his per- 
sistent tendency was to imitate changing fashions, 
there is no puzzle left. As students of literary his- 



58 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tory we have only to sketch in details of the picture 
which Shakspere's career comprehends in outline. 

In this task no guide is more helpful than that 
preface of Webster's, published, as we have seen, just 
as Shakspere stopped writing. "Without wrong to 
be named the last," you will remember, he mentions 
Shakspere, carelessly grouped with Dekker and Hey- 
wood, only after he has somewhat more respectfully 
named Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Of the six men thus hastily mentioned by Webster, 
four began their careers as dramatists before 1600. 
We may find it convenient to consider them first, and, 
indeed, to mention one or two other men, whom 
Webster neglects, before we turn to Beaumont and 
Fletcher. For these slightly earlier writers indicate 
only the disintegration of the Elizabethan drama. It 
is in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, in those of 
Webster himself, and in those of men who followed 
a little after 1612, that the decadence and exhaustion 
of the drama become unmistakable. 

First, then, for Chapman, eldest and longest-lived 
of them all. "That full and heightened style of Mas- 
ter Chapman" was the ray of light he cast by which 
Webster would have his own work read. As you 
turn page after page of the three fat little ill-printed 
volumes in which Chapman's copious utterances are 
most easily accessible, you feel Webster's criticism 
just. Only one of these volumes comprises Chapman's 
dramatic work; the others contain his great version 



THE DRAMA 59 

of Homer, his completion of Marlowe's "Hero and 
Leander," and sundry original poems. Neither these 
original poems nor his plays have truly survived ; it 
is only as translator of Homer that anyone reads 
Chapman now. As translator of Homer, however, he 
remains eminent. We need only recall Keat's sonnet 
to be assured that, whatever the verdict of modern 
scholarship, Chapman's translation is a great Eliza- 
bethan poem. After the manner of his time, Chap- 
man held Homer at once the earliest and the greatest 
of poets, and he believed poets to be literally the 
vehicles of divine inspiration. In translating Homer, 
accordingly, he felt himself a conduit of divine truth; 
and as such he seems to have held himself most wor- 
thy of lasting esteem. Indeed, he himself virtually 
asserts this conviction, in peculiarly characteristic 
terms. On the quaint title-page which preserves his 
portrait, he calls himself "Homeri Metaphrastes." 
That last word tells something of what Webster had 
in mind when he characterized Chapman's style. One 
sees instantly what "Metaphrastes" means ; but when 
I looked for it once in some Latin and Greek diction- 
aries, I could not find it. Doubtless Chapman found 
it somewhere; and very probably he chose it mostly 
because the place where he found it was a little out 
of the way. He liked the word because it was more 
full and heightened than any obvious one. 

A scholar meanwhile, this same word shows him; 
and when he turned himself to poetry he wrote in a 



60 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

spirit of didactic pedantry. His plays are as free as 
any in the language from the artificial restraints of 
pseudo-classic form; but so far as human interest goes, 
t they are as lifeless as the most slavish parody of 
Plautus or Seneca ever made by anybody. His come- 
dies are confused masses of conventional intrigue. Of 
his tragedies, the most memorable translate into ten 
acts of pompous declamation an almost contemporary 
tale of French life — the same which Dumas, some fifty 
years ago, awakened into the perennial, if trivial, vi- 
tality of "La Dame de Monsoreau." The plays of 
Chapman could never have been popular. In the ded- 
ication of the "Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois" he inci- 
dentally tells us why: "For the authentical truth of 
either person or action," he writes, "who (worth the 
respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is 
not truth, but things like truth? . . . material 
instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to vir- 
• tue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, 
limbs, and limits of an autnentical tragedy." Accord- 
ingly, when, in the very tragedy which he thus de- 
fends, he was moved to touch on poetry — and a true 
poet, he honestly held, must be divinely inspired — we 
find his inspiration breathing out the following lines: 

As worthiest poets 
Shun common and plebeian forms of speech, 
Every illiberal and affected phrase 
To clothe their matter; and together tie 
Matter and form, with art and decency ; 
So worthiest women should shun vulgar guises. 



THE DRAMA 61 

Compare these cool lucubrations with the passionate 
idealism of what Marlowe, who was younger than 
Chapman in years, as well as in spirit, had uttered 
concerning poets, in "Tamburlaine," a good while 
before : 

If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, 
Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; 
If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue could digest. 

Compare Chapman's lines with what Shakspere — 
like Marlowe, younger than Chapman — had sung of 
poetry in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" : 

The lunatic, the lover and the poet 

Are of imagination all compact : 

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; 

That is the madman : the lover, all as frantic, 

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt : 

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 



62 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Compare Chapman's lines even with what Ben Jon- 
son had written of poetry in the "Poetaster" : 

If she be 
True-born, and nursed with all the sciences, . . . 
She can so mould Rome and her monuments 
Within the liquid marble of her lines 
That they shall live, fresh and miraculous, 
Even when they mix with innovating dust. 

You can hardly help feeling the difference between 
Chapman's lines and all the others; and feeling it, 
you will surely feel where this crabbed, wise, didactic 
Chapman belongs, with that full and heightened style 
which makes him, some hold, the dramatic moralist 
best worth pondering after Shakspere himself. 

"The laboured and understanding works of Master 
Jonson," Webster names next. "Works" was what 
Jonson himself called his writings when, four years 
later, he collected them in a folio; and the name gave 
rise to sundry jests, for the greater part of these 
avowed works took the form of plays. This Ben 
Jonson, from whom they proceeded, chances to be 
the best-recorded literary figure of his time. For not 
only do his voluminous works reveal many phases 
of his assertive personality, but the note-book in which 
William Drummond, of Hawthornden, set down the 
particulars of a somewhat unwelcome visit from 
Jonson, in 1619, preserves detail of his talk with 
almost Boswellian fidelity. Of his blustering, half- 



THE DRAMA 63 

bibulous assertions, the most familiar, and perhaps the 
most characteristic is, that "Shakspere wanted art." 
Preposterous as the statement now seems, it was one 
which Jonson would seriously have maintained, there- 
by implicitly defining his own position in the history 
of our dramatic literature. Among the later Eliza- 
bethan playwrights — "Every Man in His Humour," 
his first published play, was acted in 1598 — Jonson 
was the most sturdy upholder of such pseudo-classic 
standards as imposed themselves on the theatres of 
France and of Italy. 

In fact, Jonson was thorough master of two things 
— of the later Roman classics and of vernacular Eng- 
lish. Convivial in habit, too, and on friendly terms 
with people of every social class, he knew the out- 
ward aspect of Elizabethan London remarkably well. 
The paradox of his work, accordingly, is pretty deep ; 
the actual life which he knew, and of which he labori- 
ously endeavored to record the meaning, was the life 
of a Renaissance, full of youthful ardor. The terms 
in which he strove to express this meaning were often 
those of an almost senile foreign literature. His mood 
is apt to be that of the Roman satirists — of Juvenal 
or of Martial, who were historically men of a world- 
decadence; he often translates their very words into 
the free vernacular terms of an English whose history, 
in his day, was not past but future. 

Like his fellow-scholar, Chapman, he held that a 
poet is essentially a teacher; and far more than Chap- 



64 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

man — more, indeed, than any other of the dramatists 
— he maintained and proclaimed doctrinal orthodoxy 
of form. In his introduction to "Sejanus," he stoutly 
writes : "If it be objected, that what I publish is no 
true poem, in the strict laws of time, I confess it; as 
also in the want of a proper chorus ; whose habits and 
moods are such and so difficult, as not any, whom I 
have seen, since the ancients, no, not they who have 
most presently affected laws, have yet come in the 
way of. . . . If in truth of argument, dignity of 
persons, gravity and height of elocution, fulness and 
frequency of sentence, I have discharged the other 
offices of a tragic writer, let not the absence of those 
forms be imputed to me." And he goes on to refer 
his copious annotations to the editions of Tacitus, Sue- 
tonius, and the rest, which he followed. And Shak- 
spere, a little while before, had swiftly turned passages 
from North's Plutarch into his freely English "Julius 
Caesar," half chronicle-history, half tragedy of re- 
venge. Shakspere never troubled himself about either 
the rules of classical form or the authenticity of his 
historical material. If art be really what Jonson evi- 
dently maintained it to be, Shakspere — thank God — 
really lacked art. 

This art, this conscious setting forth of his material 
in accordance with what he believed to be absolute 
law, is the quality in which Jonson excels. He was 
far enough from Puritanism; but no Puritan ever 
obeyed more dominant conscience. He did things not 



THE DRAMA 65 

as he felt like doing them, but as he laboriously came 
to understand that they ought to be done. 

Yet his plays, whatever their comparative rigidity 
in the midst of their freely romantic surroundings, are 
not a bit like the pseudo-classic plays of France or 
Italy. The reasons for this I conceive to be several. 
In the first place, as is well known, Jonson's theory of 
comedy required that each personage should embody 
some characteristic trait to the exclusion of others. 
In the language of his time, the title of his first 
comedy is an apt motto for them all. Every man, 
throughout Jonson, is in his humor; the leading pecu- 
liarity of each and all is emphasized, in the spirit of 
Roman satire, until each and all become monstrosities, 
or at best caricatures. In the second place, as I have 
said before, Jonson was completely saturated with 
the temper of decadent Roman literature. So his 
humorous characters were generally taken not so 
much from the London life he knew so well as from 
the records of a totally different phase of a different 
civilization. The annotated editions of his works re- 
veal, again and again, passages directly translated 
from ancient texts. As his contemporaries trans- 
lated stories into terms of speech and action, so he 
translated the "gravity and height of elocution, ful- 
ness and frequency of sentence" which took his fancy 
in the course of his studies; and these he translated 
into free terms of vernacular Elizabethan English. It 
is the consummate idiom of his English which pre- 



66 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

vents us from instantly recognizing how far from 
English are the thoughts and emotions which it fre- 
quently clothes. His consummate mastery of Eng- 
lish vernacular is what makes his works seem, as in 
this aspect they are, so completely Elizabethan. 

Compared with any other Elizabethan plays, all the 
while, they are very heavy reading; and for a long 
time I was puzzled to account for the difficulty of 
which I was conscious whenever I turned to them. 
The clue came at last from Drummond's notes. Jon- 
son, it seems, was a ghost-seer; the spirit of his son 
once appeared to him; again, he would lie awake of 
nights, watching the visible Turks and Tartars fight 
about his great toe. Clearly, his imagination was un- 
usually visual. Now, in reading Shakspere and the 
rest, one habitually thinks not of what their characters 
looked like, but of how each of the personages felt; 
the general temper of the Elizabethan drama is not 
that of outward observation, it is that of inward sym- 
pathy. Essentially the dramatists were true poets, 
not painters at all. Did this visualizing power of 
Jonson's, I asked myself, perhaps mean that, without 
knowing it, he conceived his scenes externally, in the 
spirit rather of a painter than of a poet? The ensu- 
ing experiment, of course, had only the authority of 
a single personal experience; but that experience sur- 
prised me. I had never found "Julius Caesar" dull; 
reading "Sejanus" in such mood as that in which one 
reads "Julius Caesar," I had never found "Sejanus" 



THE DRAMA 67 

tolerable. Now I turned to "Sejanus" with a delib- 
erate effort not to sympathize with the characters, but 
to visualize them; not to understand but to observe. 
The change in effect was such that, as I have just re- 
minded myself from an old note-book, the play kept 
me up long past bedtime; and "Julius Csesar" never did 
that. In truth, I have come to believe, Jonson, as a 
dramatist, was really not a poet but a painter. 

You will best feel what I mean, perhaps, if you turn 
to the one great play which he wrote after Webster's 
comment on him saw the light. This "Bartholomew 
Fair" seems really inspired by his experience of low 
life in London. Compared with the tavern scenes in 
"Henry IV.," however, or even with such plays as 
Middleton's comedies of city life, it seems ponderously 
confused, bewildering, inhuman. But recall your 
Hogarth ; and with Hogarth's consummate caricatures 
of Georgian England floating in your fancy, turn to 
"Bartholomew Fair" again. If your wits work like 
mine, you will find it, thus approached, quivering with 
unsuspected vitality. You will feel, beyond the range 
of doubt, that if Ben Jonson had chanced to be master 
of his pencil rather than of his pen, he would have 
left us records of Elizabethan London as vivid as 
those which Hogarth left of the eighteenth century. 
All unknowing, Ben Jonson was at heart a painter. 

An accident of language in America — I am not 
sure whether it extends to England — has made the 
word artist primarily suggest the art of painting. Had 



68 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

I just said that Jonson was at heart an artist, the 
word, in America, would have intimated almost ex- 
actly what I meant. Even in America, meanwhile, 
it would have intimated more, too; for the word in- 
cludes, of course, all fine art. Whoever, when he 
attempts expression, attempts to express himself in 
accordance with the laws of truth and of beauty, works 
in an artistic spirit. And in the range of Elizabethan 
drama, just as Chapman, with his full and heightened 
style, is probably the most pregnant moralist, so Jon- 
son is assuredly the most conscientious artist. 

This art of Jonson's appears not only in his plays. 
It appears also in the Masques with which, through 
the years of his laureateship, he so steadily delighted 
the Court; it appears, as well, in his masterly lyrics, 
and in those extracts from his note-books — called 
"Discoveries" when he printed them — which prove 
him a consummate master of prose too. Of these 
we cannot reason now; their place in our study is 
elsewhere. Now it is sufficient to be assured that 
by Webster's time "the laboured and understanding 
works of Master Jonson" had proved him, in principle 
if not in achievement, the most sturdy artist yet 
known to English letters. But sturdy art can do little 
more than pregnant moralizing to make vitally popu- 
lar drama. And the popular drama of England was 
alive. 

Examples of what it was may be found in the frag- 
ments which survive of "the right happy and copious 



THE DRAMA 69 

industry of Master Dekker and Master Heywood." 
Webster, you will remember, grouped them with 
Shakspere "(without wrong to be named last)." 
And, with a little hesitation, we may once more find 
his critical epithets well chosen. Copious they both 
were; it is recorded somewhere of Heywood that for 
years he never allowed a day to pass without at least 
one written page, and by 1633, as he stated in the 
preface to his "English Traveller," he had had "either 
an entire hand, or at least a main finger," in two 
hundred and twenty tragi-comedies. Industry, of a 
certain kind, this surely implies; and if we take the 
word "happy" in its sense of "careless," we can hardly 
find a better description than Webster's of the kind 
of industry which Dekker and Heywood exemplify. 

Both began their happily and copiously industrious 
careers before 1600; both, in fact, were almost ex- 
actly contemporary with Jonson; both, like Jonson, 
wrote on and on in the times of James I. ; both, like him, 
died under King Charles. And neither seems so to have 
changed with the passing of years as ever to have 
lost the quality which makes one feel both of them 
Elizabethan to the end. Neither, on the other hand, 
is great. For that very reason, perhaps, they more 
clearly embody the general spirit of their time. Yet 
they are not quite contemporaries of the earlier Eliza- 
bethans, with whom Shakspere began his work. For 
one thing, you can far sooner feel the limits of these 
slightly later men. 



70 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Of the two, Dekker seems the elder in temper. In 
all probability, too, he was the more habitually col- 
laborative — a fact which makes him a trifle the less 
distinct. Yet recall his "Gull's Horn Book," in fact 
only a "right happy" adaptation from a Dutch pamph- 
let, yet the treasury which preserves some of our most 
vivid records of Elizabethan London; and remember 
his "Shoemaker's Holiday," that carelessly whole- 
some romantic comedy of 'prentice tradition; or sur- 
render yourself to the careless extravagances of his 
fairy-tale, "Old Fortunatus," or to the "humorous" 
vagaries of his "Honest Whore." You need go no 
further to feel Dekker not only Elizabethan, but him- 
self, too. He had a quality which we might nowa- 
days call journalistic; if newspapers had existed in 
his time, he would have been a jewel of a reporter. 
He had the charm of kindly good-fellowship. And, 
being Elizabethan all the while, he not only had lyric 
power, but now and again he made memorable phrases. 
The best of these had already been published for eight 
years when Webster wrote of him so gently — they are 
in almost the last speech of the first part of the "Honest 
Whore" : 

Patience, my lord ! why, 'tis the soul of peace ; 
Of all the virtues 'tis nearest kin to Heaven. 
It makes men look like gods. The best of men 
That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer, 
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed. 



THE DRAMA 71 

Compare these lines with the title of the play from 
which they are culled. Remember that both are char- 
acteristic of their author, and you will begin to feel 
what manner of man Dekker was. To remind your- 
selves of where he belongs in literature, the while, 
compare his comments on patience with Portia's lovely 
rhetoric about the "quality of mercy," which had first 
been printed four years earlier. 

Like Dekker, Heywood — who wrote on well into 
King Charles's time — retained to the end his Eliza- 
bethan quality. And the right happy spirit of his 
copious industry appears in words which he published 
more than twenty years after Webster had invoked 
his example. "My plays," he says, "are not exposed 
unto the world in volumes, to bear the title of works ; 
one reason is, that many of them by shifting and 
change of companies have been negligently lost ; . . . 
and ... it never was any great ambition in 
me to be in this kind voluminously read." Of his 
writing of other than dramatic kinds, meanwhile, 
some notion may be had from the fact that in 1624 
he produced a folio of more than four hundred pages 
"concerning women," of which he stated that between 
its first conception and its final publication there had 
elapsed only seventeen weeks. Such of his plays as 
are left us — not more, at most, than one-tenth of all 
he made — are various in kind : chronicle-histories, ex- 
travagant romances, masques, and, most individually, 
what he called tragi-comedies. Nowadays we should 



72 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

be more apt to call them melodramas, dealing with 
contemporary life. One of them is almost a master- 
piece: his "Woman Killed with Kindness" tells with 
something like permanent veracity a story of domestic 
tragedy, such as the records of his time show not to 
have been infrequent. Even from this masterpiece, 
however, one derives an impression rather of what 
Heywood has told than of how he has told it. Among 
the old playwrights, he is noteworthy for lack of 
salient phrase. Yet his style remains Elizabethan in 
its freedom, its spontaneity, its ease, its adequacy. 
And two characteristics which appear in the "Woman 
Killed with Kindness" pervade his other plays too. 
The first of these is the remarkable truth to life of 
certain episodes. Nonsensical, for example, as much 
of his "Fair Maid of the West" undoubtedly is, you 
can find in its opening scenes a unique record of the 
surroundings from which old adventurers put forth 
for the Spanish Main. I, for one, can never think 
of them without some such feeling as might come from 
actual memory of gusty salt breezes, with mute mes- 
sages of the Indies beyond the seas. "Heywood," I 
find in an old note-book, "was no master-poet, sound- 
ing the depths of nature; for that very reason, he can 
carelessly show us daily life the more truly." This 
by itself would be enough to make him memorable. 
But his other characteristic power is better still. Amid 
all the right happy carelessness of his copious industry, 
he was able — as his pen ran — to set forth, beyond any 



THE DRAMA 73 

other of the playwrights but Shakspere, the charac- 
ter of a gentleman. Some of Heywood's gentlemen 
might have been ancestors of Colonel Newcome. 
Carelessly popular he was, spontaneous, veracious, 
and at heart gentle. 

We have now glanced at the four Elizabethans, 
besides Shakspere, whom Webster cited as his masters 
in 1612. On the whole, to speak paradoxically, the 
most marked trait which they possess in common is 
their diversity. The earlier group of Elizabethan 
playwrights makes a different impression from this ; 
Greene and Peele and Kyd and Marlowe and John 
Lily, whatever their divergences, one remembers to- 
gether, as one remembers the makers of Elizabethan 
lyrics; all together were breaking from the bonds of 
old conventions. This subsequent group — Chapman 
and Jonson and Dekker and Heywood — began their 
work in days when enfranchisement was won. And 
enfranchisement means disintegration. By 1612, we 
can perceive, the drama was already disintegrant. The 
story to come is a story of decline. 



Ill 

THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA. 

In 1600, we found, Elizabethan literature indicated, 
above all else, integrity of national temper. Through- 
out it seemed animated by a common spirit of buoyant 
experiment — spontaneous, enthusiastic, and versatile; 
and this had resulted in admirable poetry, lyric and 
dramatic. Such a condition can never be stationary. 
Within twelve years, we have already seen, the drama 
had conspicuously changed. We have traced the career 
of Shakspere to its close; and, taking for our guide 
the preface to Webster's "White Devil," which in 1612 
mentioned as models, by whose light he would be 
read, certain other dramatists then eminent, we have 
considered such as these as had begun their career 
before the seventeenth century opened : Chapman, Jon- 
son, Dekker, and Heywood. These men we found 
to indicate how by 16 12 the elder spirit was already 
disintegrating. Each of them, in his own way, 
though with much of the old spontaneity and vigor, 
had developed a style, a manner — a limit, if you 
will — obviously his own. Before touching on Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, the remaining masters in Webster's 

74 



THE DRAMA 75 

list, we may glance, I think, at two other dramatists 
whom he might well have included with them, among 
those by whose light we should read him. 

One is Marston, who began his work by some con- 
ventional satires, and then turned himself to the stage. 
His plays are careless, and — at least to me — repel- 
lently disagreeable. They deserve this passing men- 
tion only because, at just about the time when Shak- 
spere turned himself from the perfection of comedy 
to the perfecting of tragedy, they testify at once to 
the fact that tragedy became temporarily popular, and 
to what a detestable thing vulgar treatment of tragedy 
can be. 

The other contemporary whom Webster neglected 
was of far higher power. Middleton, to be sure, has 
not retained even such popularity as still makes faintly 
familiar the names we have already mentioned. One 
can easily see why. Of all the old dramatists, his 
natural temper seems the coldest, the least sympa- 
thetic; and although he could bend language to his 
meaning with the best, he lacked lyric power. On 
the other hand, there are moments when one feels 
Middleton's mastery of situation and of character su- 
perior to all but Shakspere's own. 

He was apt to work in collaboration, to be sure, 
particularly with Dekker, and with one or both of 
those rather indistinct Rowleys, whose office as drama- 
tists seems to have been to emphasize the merits of 
other men by interweaving with these merits their 



76 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

own manifold faults. This fact of collaboration may 
have been one reason why Middleton failed particu- 
larly to attract Webster's attention; another reason 
may be found in the probability that his most power- 
ful plays were made later than 1612. But he certainly 
began writing before 1600; and with equal certainty 
he wrote memorably. 

Broadly speaking, his work falls into two familiar 
groups — comedies and tragedies. The comedies, 
which were probably the earlier, are cleverly con- 
structed, remarkably easy in style and plausible in 
effect, firm but oddly unsympathetic in character, and 
— beyond anything on which we have touched as yet 
— deliberately indecent. None of the old dramatists 
is conspicuous for purity; Shakspere himself, far and 
away the cleanest of them, permitted himself plenty 
of passages which nobody could publish nowadays. 
In the work of Shakspere and of the other earlier 
men, the while, lubricity seems incidental, unthinking, 
and so not unwholesome. In Middleton, on the other 
hand, it seems essential, deliberate, corrupt. 

Accordingly, when one turns to his tragedies one 
is hardly surprised to find another phase of corruption, 
of palpable decadence. Particularly in "Women Be- 
ware Women" and in the "Changeling," Middleton's 
portrayal of character seems second only to that of 
Shakspere. The difference appears, however, when 
we feel that strange, insidious heartlessness which pre- 
vents him, despite his insight, from sympathizing with 



THE DRAMA 77 

the personages whom he creates. It appears more 
saliently still when we grow aware that the only sort 
of character which seems to interest Middleton is 
evil. With all Heywood's right happy copiousness, 
we found, he could carelessly tell us how the spirit 
of a gentleman stays changeless through the ages. 
What Middleton, with all his cool deliberation, could 
best set forth is how a woman can lapse from girl- 
hood to harlotry. In tragedy as in comedy, he shows 
us the depths of life — not the heights. In both, too, 
he lacks the touch of lyric spontaneity which pervaded 
the happy copiousness of the men who were writing 
around him. And thus, standing apart from the rest, 
just as each of the rest stands apart from the others, 
he stands apart from all on whom we have as yet 
touched. For his is the first great figure to signalize 
not only the disintegration of the drama but also its 
imminent decadence. 

Decadence, beyond question, appears throughout 
the intermingled work of the last two masters whom 
Webster mentions among those by whose light he 
wishes what he writes may be read. "The no less 
worthy composures of the both worthily excellent 
Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher" is his phrase 
for them; in which words it is hardly fantastic to 
discern allusion to their gentleness of birth. Fletcher's 
father, a clergyman who in Elizabeth's time attended 
Mary Stuart to the scaffold, died Bishop of London; 
and Beaumont's, a country gentleman by origin, rose 



78 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

to be a judge and a knight. Among the old dramatists 
no others are known to have lived so little 

lost in mists and fogs of people 
Noteless and out of name. 

The mere accident of rank, however, could never have 
given them, together or apart, their reputation and 
influence. More than twenty years after Fletcher died, 
and more than thirty after the death of Beaumont, 
Shirley, in his introduction to the first folio of their 
plays, could write of the book as "without flattery, 
the greatest monument of the scene that time and 
humanity have produced," and therefore as bound to 
"live, not only the crown and sole reputation of our 
own, but the stain of all other nations and languages." 
From the time, not yet definitely known, when they 
began to write until the closing of the theatres — and, 
indeed, for some years after the theatres were re- 
opened, at the Restoration — their plays seem to have 
been decidedly the most popular in the language. No 
one else could draw such houses. 

Modern criticism has attempted, with some plausi- 
bility, to distinguish between them. In "Philaster," 
for example, there is a passage concerning death which 
may probably be attributed to Beaumont: 

'Tis less than to be born ; a lasting sleep ; 
A quiet resting from all jealousy, 
A thing we all pursue ; I know, besides, 
It is but giving over of a game 
That must be lost. 



THE DRAMA 79 

Compare this with a similar passage in "Thierry 
and Theodoret," which is almost certainly by Fletcher: 

'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest. 
Children begin it to us, strong men seek it, 
And kings from height of all their painted glory 
Fall like spent exhalations to this centre ; 
And those are fools that fear it, or imagine 
A few unhandsome pleasures or life's profits 
Can recompense this peace ; and mad that stay it 
Till age blow out their lights, or rotten vapours 
Bring them dispersed to the earth. . . . 

You can hardly help feeling a difference between 
these two passages, not only in formal style but in 
temperamental mood; the first is in every sense the 
finer ; the latter is at once the more elaborately rhetor- 
ical, the more palpably sentimental, and somewhat the 
sweeter. At the same time, you can hardly help feel- 
ing that the passages have in common something 
deeper than their differences. Both have a touch of 
insidious, charming sentimentality. In both, the verse, 
with an almost cloying sweetness, has lost that note 
of aspiring grandeur which never forsook "Marlowe's 
mighty line." Yet both are instantly intelligible and 
lingeringly delightful. We shall make no error if for 
a moment we neglect the moderns, and follow Webster 
and Shirley and the rest, grouping Beaumont and 
Fletcher together. 

The secret of their popularity is not hard to find. 
Beyond any of the men we have considered before — 



80 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

beyond any, I think, who wrote before them — they 
were, first and always, men with a cultivated instinct 
for stage effect. More sophisticated than their prede- 
cessors, and so more skilful, they were never ham- 
pered by any suspicion of ulterior purpose. They were 
thorough masters of the theatre, and they rested con- 
tent with that. They had discovered what they could 
do; they did it again and again, seeking freshness of 
effect, not like the elder men in experiment, but in 
pretty and subtle variations on familiar themes. Brill- 
iant they surely were; sympathetic, too, both with the 
surface of their characters and still more with their 
audiences; admirable craftsmen in a theatrical way, 
and accomplished poets; gentlemen, as well, after the 
fashion of their time ; but never troubled — and so never 
troublesome — with any deep sense that life has signifi- 
cance. Their dramatic sense meanwhile was so strong 
that their plays, occasionally revived in private ex- 
periment, still hold the attention of an audience more 
readily than Shakspere's own. So they poured out 
play after play — comedies, melodramas, tragedies, bur- 
lesques, pastorals, masques — with no hampering con- 
science, but with keen relish for all manner of emo- 
tion, whether this sprang from frank sensuality and 
gross sensationalism or from the exquisite cadences 
of lyric poetry. Beyond the rest, they indicate a Re- 
naissance past the zenith of its strength, but not of its 
splendor. With them we are in that fascinating period 
of nascent decadence which foretells the end of any 



THE DRAMA 81 

school of art; rejoicing in life with such full conscious- 
ness of delight as could not come before and yet is 
destined swiftly to become dulled and jaded. 

So no wonder they took the stage by storm, and 
held it long. The wonder rather is that, for the last 
two hundred years, their plays have been so little acted. 
Yet, as one ponders over their pages, the wonder 
fades. These pages are full of beauties ; except Shak- 
spere, none of their fellow-dramatists has left us half 
so rich a treasury of beautiful phrases. In no other, 
for example, would you easily find lines so instantly 
appealing as the first of theirs which come to my mind 
as I write — the prayer of Caratach before the battle 
in "Bonduca" : 

Give us this day good hearts, good enemies, 

Good blows o' both sides, wounds that fear or flight 

Can claim no share in. 

And the other fragments I have quoted already are 
but examples of thousands. Yet these, as one reads, 
prove not only — like the prayer in Sidney's "Arcadia" 
— mere miracles of masterly rhetoric. They prove, 
too, imbedded — to quote one of themselves — in 

such qualities, and such wild flings, 
Such admirable imperfections, 

that nowadays many good folks might well be loath 
to own their makers for brethren. 

A phase of their decadence, by the way, I have 



82 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

unintentionally illustrated in that last sentence. Their 
verse is wonderfully easy and sweet and spontaneous; 
yet it is so near the rhythm of prose that you can 
often imbed it in a modern sentence where it will 
instantly sink beneath reach of the ear. Hardly an 
imperfection that, to be sure; or at least not of a 
kind instantly to indicate why they are neglected 
to-day. An incident which lately occurred will tell 
that story. A few months ago a friend of mine, who 
had long and deeply delighted in their poetry, was 
asked to prepare for popular reading two or three 
plays of theirs, which he was left free to select. The 
man in question has never impressed me as a prig; yet 
after some weeks of hesitation, he declined the task 
because, after scrutiny, he could find none of their 
plays which he was willing to lay before the general 
public with the sanction of his name. One and all 
of the comedies were too corrupt, too indecent. They 
had a charm, to be sure, which raised them above the 
cold obscenities of Middleton, and which wakened into 
romantic or sentimental life such humors as in the 
labored and understanding comedies of Jonson seem 
almost monstrous. But, for all that, they were as 
lewd as the feebler, and therefore baser, comedies of 
the Restoration. Yet, if you attempted to expurgate 
them, you altered them beyond recognition. And the 
case with the other than comic plays of Beaumont 
and Fletcher proved little better: the "Maid's Trag- 
edy" dwells on hideously cynical seduction ; the "King 



THE DRAMA 83 

and No King," on incest; "Valentinian," on rape. 
Everywhere you find poetic beauties ; everywhere these 
grow luxuriantly from a festering corruption beneath. 
There is hardly one of their more than fifty plays 
which could be presented to-day without such ex- 
purgation as should leave it no longer itself. And 
so, perhaps, our English stage is not altogether the 
poorer for having lost them. 

In their own day, to be sure, the stage was the 
richer for them. Their beauties are as much their 
own as their vices, and were equally welcome to their 
public. The likeness of their work to the romances 
of Shakspere — in subject, in structure, in peculiarities 
of verse — has often been remarked; and they have 
consequently been supposed to have begun by skilful 
superficial imitation of his spiritually ripest phase. 
The question is one of chronology, not yet fixed in 
detail; but, as I have told you already, the studies 
of my friend, Professor Thorndike, have virtually 
proved that several of their plays must have been in 
existence decidedly before the dates commonly as- 
signed to "Cymbeline," the "Tempest," or the "Win- 
ter's Tale." If he is right — and I believe him so — 
the relation commonly thought to have existed between 
them and Shakspere is precisely reversed. Shakspere 
was the imitator, not they; indeed, as we have seen, 
he was from the beginning an imitator, not an in- 
ventor. And here his imitations are not in all re- 
spects better than his models. The comparative super- 



84 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ficiality of Beaumont and Fletcher made them easy to 
understand, and by this time Shakspere was too preg- 
nant a poet to be instantly comprehensible. Their 
insidious corruption of temper, too, made them pep- 
per the higher, and so the surer to please. Shakspere's 
qualities were far greater and deeper than theirs, but 
theirs were more popular, more amusing than his. 
Audiences would probably have preferred them. In 
which fact we may find, if we choose, a reason why, 
after a little friendly collaboration with Fletcher, 
Shakspere may have withdrawn from a professional 
career in which these younger men proved able to 
attract the public more than he could. 

Beaumont died in the same year with Shakspere; 
Fletcher survived until 1625 — his later plays slightly 
exaggerating the decadent traits evident in those which 
Beaumont and he had written together. The change 
may have been due to comparative weakness in 
Fletcher, or perhaps to the hastening decadence of his 
time, or to the mere weight of accumulating years. 
The noteworthy fact about these last of the men whom 
Webster mentioned as his masters is that, unlike most 
of their forerunners, they began their work better than 
they ended it. Marlowe's best plays are his latest. 
Even Shakspere's romances hold their own. With 
Beaumont and Fletcher, one feels not a growth in 
power, but rather a slow, gentle decline. 

We must hasten on to Webster. We have now 
glanced at all the playwrights by whose light he de- 



THE DRAMA 85 

sired to be read — at Marston, too, and Middleton, and 
the Rowleys. There is only one other earlier name, 
I think, which he might have mentioned — that of 
Cyril Tourneur, whose reckless tragedies, coming be- 
tween Marston's and Webster's — less monstrously 
crude than the former, incalculably less profound than 
the latter — have lately appealed to the kind of taste 
which likes to be called decadent. Webster himself 
is made of more substantial stuff. In power, I incline 
to believe, he rises above all the other playwrights ex- 
cept Marlowe and Shakspere. 

But human power has its historical stages. There 
are moments when, like Marlowe's and that of the 
lyric poets before and around him, it exerts itself in 
breaking old bonds; there are moments when, for a 
little while — as with Shakspere, and some of the lesser 
men at whom we have glanced — it seems free; but 
there must swiftly come later moments when self- 
consciousness begins to be inhibitory, when every ef- 
fort seems to be a conscious one to struggle against 
the tightening force of new bonds. Webster's power 
always seems thus inhibited. His work is a wonderful 
example of how, in any school of art, a crushing 
sense of fact is sure fatally to overpower the surgent 
imagination which has lately awakened that art from 
lethargy to life. 

So far as personal record goes, Webster's history 
is shadowy; and among the few plays he has left us, 
two will serve our purpose — the colossal sketch he 



86 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

called the "White Devil," and the later, far more 
finished, "Duchess of Malfi." At first sight, both seem 
almost crabbedly obscure; on fresh readings both re- 
veal more and more beauties. But, no matter how 
well you know them, neither ever approaches the 
lucidity of Marlowe or of Shakspere ; and this, chiefly, 
I think, because throughout them both every touch 
seems to have demanded conscious, deliberate effort. 
The stories of both are Italian. The former is essen- 
tially historical ; Vittoria Accoramboni was alive thirty 
years before this dramatic account of her career was 
printed. The "Duchess of Malfi" comes from an older 
story, which found its way into Paynter's "Palace of 
Pleasure" ; in atmosphere and treatment, however, the 
play, though by far the more elaborately developed, 
resembles the other so closely that we may fairly 
consider them together, choosing our characteristic 
examples of Webster from either. 

The first thing which reveals his inhibitory sense 
of fact is the amazing truth to actual life of his Italy. 
This is not a matter of historical detail. Webster 
makes as free with names and dates and recorded 
circumstances as any of his fellows made. But com- 
pare the Italy of Webster's "White Devil" with the 
France of Chapman's "Bussy d'Ambois" — also less 
than thirty years past when the play about it was 
written. Chapman's France is an impalpable nowhere, 
peopled with stalking utterers of his full and height- 
ened style; Webster's Italy, beside it, seems as accu- 



THE DRAMA 87 

rately local as that of Stendhal. Again, compare this 
Italy of Webster's with that of Middleton, who — 
perhaps a little later — turned the story of Bianca 
Capello into "Women Beware Women." For all 
Middleton's realism, his Florence is still a region not 
quite of fact, but of imagination too; a place to which 
one might have journeyed from Romeo's Verona or 
from Othello's Venice. By its side, Webster's Italy 
again reminds one of Stendhal's. Though it be fiction, 
it has a value almost documentary. 

Now this Medicean Italy which he so faithfully 
tried to set forth was perhaps the most complex as 
well as the most corrupt region known to modern 
history. Intrigue within intrigue really marked it as 
the land which bred Machiavelli and thus gave our 
language an adjective to enshrine the memory of 
him. A sense of this complexity seems to have 
weighed down on Webster until it became benumb- 
ing; he always seems aware of how very much he 
has to tell, afraid lest he shall lose some thread of his 
labyrinthine argument, lest he shall unduly simplify 
deeds and characters which simplicity would belie. 
He never approaches unconscious ease; he never re- 
laxes into sympathetic humor; there are no Nurses 
in his Italian world, or Mercutios. There are won- 
derful villains, though, and tenderly pathetic victims. 
The evil of life and the suffering — the horror and the 
sadness — he sets forth wonderfully. His work is full 
of isolated situations, and phrases, and touches of 



88 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

character and of aphorism, which seem almost ulti- 
mate in their combined power and truth to life. What 
makes the total effect of them bewildering is that he 
could never quite fuse them into organic unity. Again 
and again, he throws upon his readers the task of 
composing, if so they may, his marvellous fragments 
of tragedy. They are like some unfinished mosaic, 
needing a flash of electric fire to melt their outlines 
into the intelligible unity of painting. 

Again, in a very different way, you may feel Web- 
ster's inhibitory sense of fact in obviously imitative 
passages, such as his modest preface to the "White 
Devil" calls instant attention to. You will remember, 
for example, how the dying Desdemona flickers into 
an instant of revived life, when those about her al- 
ready think the end come: 

Emilia. 
Cassio, my lord, hath kill'd a young Venetian, 
Call'd Roderigo. 

Othello. 
Roderigo kill'd ! 
And Cassio kill'd ! 

Emilia. 
No, Cassio is not kill'd. 
Othello. 
Not Cassio kill'd ! then murder's out of tune, 
And sweet revenge grows harsh. 

Desdemona. 
O, falsely, falsely murder'd ! 
Emilia. 

Alas, what cry is that? 



THE DRAMA 89 

Othello. 
That ! what? 

Emilia. 

Out, and alas ! that was my lady's voice. 

Help ! help, ho ! O lady, speak again ! 

Sweet Desdemona ! O sweet mistress, speak ! 

Desdemona. 
A guiltless death I die. 

Emilia. 
O, who hath done this deed? 

Desdemona. 
Nobody ; I myself. Farewell : 
Commend me to my kind lord : O, farewell ! [Dies.] 

Othello. 
Why, how should she be murdered ? etc. 

Compare with this the death scene of the strangled 
Duchess of Malfi. Bosola, at whose bidding the mur- 
der has been done, is left alone with her body; and 
here is what ensues : 

Bosola. 
What would I do, were this to do again? 
I would not change my peace of conscience 
For all the wealth of Europe. She stirs ; here's life : 
Return, fair soul from darkness, and lead mine 
Out of this nimble hell : she's warm, she breathes : 
Upon thy pale lips I will melt my heart, 
To store them with fresh colour. Who's there? 
Some cordial drink ! Alas ! I dare not call : 
So pity would destroy pity. Her eye opes, 
And heaven in it seems to ope, that late was shut, 
To take me up to mercy. 



9 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Duchess. 
Antonio ! 

Bosola. 

Yes, madam, he is living ; 

The dead bodies you saw were but figur'd statues. 

He's reconciled to your brother ; the Pope hath wrought 

The atonement. 

Duchess. 
Mercy ! [Dies.] 

Bosola. 

O, she's gone again ! there the cords of life broke, etc. 

The likeness is too close to be accidental. Webster 
tried to outdo one of Shakspere's most daring stage 
effects, and nearly overstepped the line which divides 
the sublime from the ridiculous. 

But his imitations are sometimes more impressive. 
In Ben Jonson's "Cynthia's Revels," for example, 
there is a prettily fantastic scene in which Mercury 
awakens Echo, whose responses to his questions — re- 
peating their final syllables — make very pretty plays 
on words. In the "Duchess of Malfi" this stage effect 
is deliberately reproduced, but in a mood of fantastic 
horror which makes Webster's Echo — no longer em- 
bodied but literal — faintly foreshadow the fantasy of 
Poe's "Raven." Again, the way in which Webster 
exhausts the resources of combined grotesqueness and 
horror which reside in the old stage convention of 
madness, is reminiscent not only of Kyd and of Mid- 
dleton, but of Shakspere himself once more. When 
you compare the "Duchess of Malfi" with Kyd's 
"Spanish Tragedy" or with Middleton's "Change- 



THE DRAMA 91 

ling," it seems a work of genius. When you compare 
it with "Hamlet" or "Lear," you feel how that genius 
was subdued by its sense of the greater genius in 
whose light it prayed to be read. 

In Webster's very style, too, a similar inhibitory 
sense of his task appears. Undoubtedly he had ex- 
traordinary narrative power ; but none of his narrative 
passages quite fit their context — as Menenius Agrip- 
pa's fable of the Belly does, for example, in "Corio- 
lanus." Webster had rare power of aphorism, too, 
but his aphorisms seem more like those of a formal 
book of proverbs than like the consecutive utterances 
of human beings. He had, as well, an unusual faculty 
for illustrative comparisons drawn straight from Nat- 
ure; yet these, too, stand by themselves. They are 
as far from the exuberant ingenuity of Lily as they 
are from the calm finality of Dante. 

And when we come to the form of his verse, we 
find this broken beyond all precedent before. You 
will have felt this in the contrast between the rhythm 
of "Othello" and that of the "Duchess of Malfi." 
But go a little further; take two of Marlowe's more 
familiar lines : 

O thou art fairer than the evening air, 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars! 

Here you have the blank-verse of our drama in its 
first freshness. Take the first phrase which comes to 
mind from Shakspere's maturity : 



92 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

She looks like sleep, 
As she would catch another Antony 
In her strong toil of grace. 

Here you have dramatic blank-verse at its acme. Now 
compare with these Webster's most familiar line — 
that which Ferdinand utters as he looks down at the 
sister he has had murdered: 

Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young. 

That line is marvellous in its truth — its insight. But 
every quiver of the old music is silent, which once 
held verse above the level of life. The rhythm is that 
of a poet who cannot escape consciousness that his 
personages are human beings, who should speak in 
the language not of convention but of mankind. One 
may almost say that Webster's style seems instantly 
poetical only in his infrequent lyric passages: the so- 
called "Land Dirge," for example: 

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren, 

Since o'er shady graves they hover, 

And with leaves and flowers do cover 

The friendless bodies of unburied men. 

Call unto his funeral dole 

The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole, 

To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, 

And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm. 

But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, 

For with his nails he'll dig them up again. 

Whatever they lost, the old playwrights, to the end, 
could still be lyric when they would. 



THE DRAMA 93 

So Webster, too, proves more tragic in a way, 
than the laborious and wonderful tragedies which, 
amid all his inhibitory consciousness of fact, his 
power of imagination was still able to block out. 
For the limits which were so fast closing about him 
were such as we can now see, in the perspective of 
three hundred years, to have meant that not only he, 
but all who followed him, could never do more in 
their own art than follow the masters by whose light 
they would be sympathetically read. Marlowe began 
English tragedy, we may say. Kyd and Marston care- 
lessly developed it. Shakspere brought it to its acme. 
Tourneur showed the beginning of its wildly rapid 
decline. In Webster one feels its expiring and de- 
spairing effort. So an end. 

There were later men, of course; it is said that the 
"Duchess of Malfi" was acted in 1616 — the year when 
Shakspere died, when Beaumont died, and when Ben 
Jonson published the first folio volume of his works. 
Jonson himself wrote on; so did Heywood, and Mid- 
dleton, and Fletcher, and more. But there was no 
new note in any of their work; and there was little 
new in the work of the three still-remembered drama- 
tists whose whole production virtually belongs to this 
later period. These are Ford, Massinger, and Shirley. 

They were the decadent masters of a great school 
of art, we must remember ; they retained, as such men 
always must retain, trace after trace of its greatness. 
You can find such qualities throughout the history 



94 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of expression. If every vestige of the Parthenon 
frieze had crumbled away, we might still feel some- 
thing of the splendor of Greek sculpture from such 
remnants of it as those triumphal figures bearing the 
spoils of Jerusalem through the Arch of Titus. Like 
the Roman sculptors, too, and their own English pre- 
decessors, the latest dramatists followed the old meth- 
ods to the end. To the end, accordingly, these old 
dramatists were not, like modern artists, creators, 
but rather they were frankly translators and adapters. 
. A single passage from Ford may perhaps serve ac- 
cordingly to define his place for us. In the last 
scene of "Love's Sacrifice" he combines the catas- 
trophes of "Much Ado About Nothing," "Romeo and 
Juliet," and "Othello." And here are some of the 
lines in which Fernando — for the instant reproducing 
Romeo — rants out how he feels his poison work: 

It works, it works already, bravely ! bravely ! 
Now, now I feel it tear each several joint. 
O royal poison ! trusty friend ! split, split 
Both heart and gall asunder, excellent bane ! 

In this laborious iteration, anyone can instantly feel 
the touch of exhaustion. This is not the old mastery ; 
it is a feeble imitation of accepted conventions, fall- 
ing into palpably overwrought rhetorical device. And 
mention together the name of this play — "Love's Sac- 
rifice" — and the names of those which it mimics — 
"Much Ado About Nothing" and "Romeo and Juliet" 



THE DRAMA 95 

and "Othello." Shakspere, no doubt, imitated, too; 
but the master altered Lily, and whomsoever else he 
imitated, for the better, lifting mortality into immor- 
tality ; Ford, the follower, gently lulled the master to 
mortal sleep. Not that Ford was a weakling; only, 
where Webster's power struggled, with some trace 
of the old titanic strength, against the new traditions, 
Ford was of such later time as must perforce submit. 
You will remember those passionate lines about beauty 
in Marlowe's "Tamburlaine." Put beside them Ford's 
most surely lasting words, similar in purpose: 

Can you paint a thought? or number 
Every fancy in a slumber? 
Can you count soft minutes roving 
From a dial's point by moving? 
Can you grasp a sigh? or lastly 
Rob a virgin's honour chastely? 

No, O, no ! yet you may 
Sooner do both that and this, 
This and that, and never miss, 
That by any praise display 
Beauty's beauty . . . 

The contrast shadows the whole story — told again, if 
you will, in a comparison of how chronicle-history 
awoke in Marlowe's "Edward II.," and lived in 
"Henry IV.," and sank to sleep again in Ford's 
"Perkin Warbeck." 

There is far more in Ford than this, else he would 
have been utterly forgotten. But this — his historical 



96 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

position — is what concerns us now. So there is far 
more in Massinger than his moralizing, painstaking 
rhetoric — the very laborious evenness of which stands 
in such sharp contrast to the excellent flashes of poetry 
sure to vivify the careless conventions and the cloudy 
rant of the true Elizabethans. One of his plays has 
chanced feebly to survive on the stage. With 
the exception of Shakspere, the "New Way to Pay 
Old Debts" is the only relic of the Elizabethan drama 
which I ever remember on the bills. In some degree, 
of course, this is because the part of Sir Giles Over- 
reach gives such an admirable opportunity to a skilful 
"star." Still more, I think, it is because the play itself 
happens to retain so many traces of the stronger stuff 
on which its lighter structure is built. It is adapted 
from Middleton's "Trick to Catch the Old One," a 
play replete with careless, indecent life; and it tells 
its expurgated story with much vestige of the humors 
which Ben Jonson's understanding labors introduced 
on our stage and which Beaumont and Fletcher ro- 
manticized. Yet compared with work by Beaumont 
and Fletcher, by Jonson, or by Middleton, it seems 
throughout not spontaneous or vital, but only con- 
scientiously rhetorical. And as for Massinger's verse, 
here is how Sir Giles commends a suitor to his 
daughter : 

'Tis an honorable man ; 
A lord, Meg, and commands a regiment 
Of soldiers, and what's rare, is one himself, 



THE DRAMA 97 

A bold and understanding one : and to be 
A lord, and a good leader, in one volume 
Is granted unto few but such as rise up 
The kingdom's glory. 

Superb rhetoric still, but no more like our older dra- 
matic poetry than I to Hercules. 

The last of the old dramatists was James Shirley. 
Like all the rest, he was born under Queen Elizabeth. 
Of all he was the only one to survive until the Restora- 
tion; by a fitting chance, his end came from exposure 
during that London fire which, when he was seventy 
years old, swept out of existence the city for whose 
denizens the playwrights had made delight. This last 
of them died with Gothic St. Paul's, and the Eliza- 
bethan capital which had festered about it. And as to 
Shirley's work, I know of nothing more significant than 
what James Russell Lowell somewhere tells. He loved 
our old dramatic poets, and read them deeply. One day 
his eye lighted on a set of Shirley, which had long 
been on his shelves. He could not recall that he had 
ever read a line of it. He took a volume down, pre- 
pared for a new pleasure; and there, on page after 
page, he found what he later found in the other vol- 
umes, too — pencilled notes in his own handwriting. 
Years before he had annotated the whole set, and in 
them all he had found nothing to abide in that won- 
derful literary memory of his, who more than any other 
American of his time searched all things, and held fast 
that which is good. Shirley wrote copiously, in al- 



98 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

most every manner practised by the Elizabethan play- 
wrights ; he did nothing very ill ; but he did nothing so 
well as to stamp on it any individuality of his own. He 
is a fact, accordingly, not in literature, but in literary 
history— marking, as none had marked before him, 
how completely the life was gone from that complete 
school of literature which, in 1600, had seemed in- 
exhaustibly vital. 

When the Puritan Gosson, in 1579, published his 
"School of Abuse," attacking all fine art, there was 
no real need of Sidney's "Defence of Poesie" to sustain 
the superb Elizabethan integrity which was so soon 
to raise the English stage above all others but the 
Greek. When Shakspere, in 1600, published — or more 
probably saw published by piratical booksellers — more 
of his plays than in any year before, this integrity of 
national expression seemed still unbroken. When, in 
1633, * ne Puritan Prynne made his more famous at- 
tack — "Histriomastix" — the giants were dead or 
dying, each by himself; and the stage had truly sunk 
into a deadness which makes the closing of the thea- 
tres, nine years later, seem like the sealing of some 
noisome tomb. 

It is needless to dwell longer on this phase or that 
of the swift decline; on the increasing monstrosity of 
tragic motives, or the constantly more conscious ob- 
scenities of comedy; on the exhaustion which led to 
all manner of excess; on the way in which humorous 
exaggeration suppressed truth of character and blind- 



THE DRAMA 99 

ed insight ; on the benumbing consciousness of the 
new traditions which finally made the romantic drama 
as servile to convention as ever was the pseudo-classic ; 
on the sinking of blank-verse into a rhetoric which 
no ear can distinguish from prose. The story which 
all these symptoms tell is the same. In 1600, English 
audiences were national; the scenes and the words 
which appealed to them expressed the integral spirit 
of the pristine Elizabethan world. In 1642, English 
audiences were only a class by themselves — fastidi- 
ously cultivated, perhaps, both in the graces and in 
the vices of acknowledged fashion, but with hardly 
a trace left of that eager strenuousness which had ani- 
mated the robust integrity of the elder time. 

It is needless, either, to dwell on the forms of 
drama which retained most life — the most elaborately 
artificial, the Masques which afforded the court such 
delight as later times have specialized into the opera 
and the ballet; or on the one spark of lasting vitality 
which survived. For even Shirley had lyric power 
still. Witness such a stanza as this : 

The glories of our blood and state 

Are shadows, not substantial things; 

There is no armour against fate; 

Death lays his icy hand on kings: 

Sceptre and crown 

Must tumble down, 

And in the dust be equal made 

With the poor crooked scythe and spade. 



LofC. 



ioo THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

For us it is enough, just now, to recall that when 
we tried to symbolize the mood of Elizabethan litera- 
ture, we fell to remembering the Pillars of Hercules, 
and how the old voyagers passed together through 
these limits, eager to explore the unknown seas be- 
yond. If we recur to that image, and fancy ourselves 
to have been of the fleet, voyaging in that bark which 
was laden with the riches of the drama, we may fancy, 
as we remember the course of it, which we have so 
hastily traced, that some current swept us uncontrol- 
lably away from all our convoy. And so at last — 
with a swiftness which should make us reel — our first 
tragic discovery is the sinking beneath our feet of 
the craft 

Which once we deemed the vessel of our hopes 
Upon the seas of the future. 



IV 

THE DIVERGENT MASTERS OF LYRIC POETRY 

We have tried to render ourselves some broad ac- 
count of how integrally the spontaneous, enthusiastic, 
and versatile national temper of England displayed 
itself in literature when the seventeenth century be- 
gan. And in tracing the course of the drama from 
its luxuriant life in 1600 to its extinction at the close 
of the theatres in 1642, we have seen how the most 
admirable phase of that integral Elizabethan literature 
disintegrated and declined. Our next effort will be 
to follow the course of other English poetry the while. 

Instead of other poetry I had almost said lyric. 
The very hesitation which made me substitute that 
colorless little word deserves a moment's attention. 
In such considerations as ours, we are forced to sim- 
plify fact; if, in contemplating any aspect of our sub- 
ject, we can clearly discern some characteristic feature 
by which it may surely be distinguished from its sur- 
roundings, we must rest for the moment content. 
Thus, in touching on one or another of the great men 
who composed that great school of drama from which 
Shakspere sprung — great the least of them, however 

IOI 



102 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

far he may have lingered below the standard of the 
greatest, — we did not scruple to neglect innumerable 
features of him. All we attempted was to perceive 
his relation, on the whole, to his fellows. And some- 
thing like this is all we can attempt now, when we 
turn to the makers of those other, less instantly popu- 
lar phases of poetry which equally altered with the 
century we are contemplating together. So, far 
as I should have been from comprehensively right, I 
should not have been all wrong if I had said at once 
that we were now to deal with lyric poetry, as distin- 
guished from dramatic. For very surely, whatever 
form, other than dramatic, English poetry took during 
the last years of the sixteenth century and during the 
half-century which followed, the grace which has kept 
it alive is its lyric quality. Epic in purpose, one poet 
may have been, no doubt; another, didactic; a third, 
satirical; but whoever among them is remembered or 
read to-day is remembered, not for these several pur- 
poses, but for the lyric beauties which grew first with 
something like the natural luxuriance of wild flowers, 
and later with a luxuriance more like that which de- 
lights us in lovingly tended gardens. 

If I were asked, indeed, to cite verses which my 
memory has unconsciously selected as typical of Eng- 
lish poetry about 1600, I should hardly hesitate to 
repeat a little song from Campion's "Book of Airs" 
which has lingered with me hauntingly ever since I 
first read it: 



POETRY 103 

When thou must home to shades of underground, 

And there arrived, a new admired guest 
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, 

White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, 
To hear the stories of thy finished love, 
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; 

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, 

Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, 

Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, 
And all those triumphs for thy beauty's sake: 

When thou hast told these honors done to thee, 

Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me. 

Though this lack the enthusiastic spontaneity — the 
full experimental youthfulness — of those elder lyrics 
which we hastily summarized when we touched on the 
first outburst of Elizabethan song, it has at once the 
felicity of a momentary mastery still unfettered by 
consciousness of limitation, and a wonderful lyric 
purity. Campion was as much a musician as a poet, 
but he lived and wrote his airs at a time when his 
art of music was so far from its later, overweening 
development that whoever made words for singing 
made the words themselves sing. 

All the while I should have known that this was 
far from the whole story, just as I knew how much 
we neglected when we first tried to summarize our 
impression of Elizabethan poetry. The chief feature 
of this poetry still seems to me its buoyant integrity 
of enthusiastic experiment. First struggling with the 



104 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

difficulties of a language not yet tamed to the service 
of fine art, then swiftly finding themselves masters of 
it, the poets — I had almost said the Englishmen — who 
breathed the air of the spacious elder days surged with 
the dramatists through the straits which had fixed the 
limits of the old world, daringly and joyously ready 
to explore the mysteries beyond. But already, when 
the seventeenth century began, there were many signs 
which told how the little fleet must scatter — tokens 
of the disintegration to come. 

On Spenser, in his lofty isolation from the rest, we 
dwelt a little at first; and our purpose then was such 
that we were warranted in thinking of him almost as 
if he had been solitary. But this was no more the 
case with him than with Shakspere. The first three 
books of the "Faerie Queene" were published in 1590. 
Before Spenser's death, nine years later, various other 
men had published poems which began to indicate di- 
vergent tendencies, each of which might well deserve 
careful study. Daniel, and a very little later Drayton, 
had begun their copious careers. They had not only 
added their parts to the growing list of sonnet-se- 
quences which was so swiftly developing the excellent 
experiments of Sidney into the permanence of Shak- 
spere; they had also produced their first examples of 
that patriotic narrative poetry which — although it 
contained the germs of greatness — never quite reached 
the height of true epic nor yet such development as 
that of its dramatic brother, the chronicle-history. 



POETRY 105 

Yet, in Drayton's hands, it later achieved one master- 
piece. There is hardly anything in our language to 
surpass his stirring "Ballad of Agincourt," which 
begins : 

Fair stood the wind for France, 

When we our sails advance, 

Nor now to prove our chance 
Longer will tarry; 

But putting to the main, 

At Caux, the mouth of Seine, 

With all his martial train, 
Landed King Harry. 

Campbell tried that kind of thing, and so did Tenny- 
son; both admirably. But read their verses by the 
side of Drayton's — himself a man of less gift than 
either — and you will know, even though you cannot 
tell, how none but Elizabethans could quite match the 
quality of the elder note. 

Southwell, meantime, hanged for a Jesuit at Ty- 
burn, had left us his little treasury of mystic fantasies, 
preserving record of the gentle and adoring ecstasies 
which inspired and consoled through persecution the 
spirit of English Catholicism. Beautiful purity of 
heart they bespeak ; Southwell was one who need never 
have feared but he should see God. Yet there are 
moods in which one questions whether this quality is, 
in truth, his most noteworthy; for the images in which 
he clothes his ingenuous purity seem now and again, 
for all their sweetness, somewhat trivial in their con- 



106 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

scious ingenuity. Such conscious ingenuity, without 
the balance of fervor and of ecstasy, pervades the un- 
mitigated fantasies of Sir John Davies — with his 
"Orchestra," his "Nosce Teipsum," and his "Hymns 
of Astraea." These last are perhaps most typical. 
All are anagrams. The initial letters of the sixteen 
lines composing everyone spell the royal name Eliza- 
betha Regina. Yet the cramping necessity of be- 
ginning lines with the letters B E T H A did not pre- 
vent Davies from making stanzas so freely lyric as 

this: 

But, Nightingale, sith you delight 
Ever to watch the starry night; 
Tell all the stars of heaven, 
Heaven never had a star so bright 
As now to earth is given ; 

namely, her maiden majesty, then sixty-six years of 
age. 

At about the same time the satires of Hall and of 
Marston — far from immortal, to be sure — carried 
perceptibly forward a kind of poetry which has al- 
ways seemed exotic in our language, because its real 
effort is to express the facts of modern experience 
in the terms of decadent Rome. And in the same 
years the full and heightened style of Chapman had 
begun to enrich English with that version of Homer 
which remains precious. Not the least wonder of the 
lines in which Keats recorded his first knowledge of 
it is the precision with which they express the spirit, 



POETRY 107 

not of Greece, but of the closing sixteenth century 
when Elizabeth reigned, and Chapman wrote, and 
there were still worlds to conquer: 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken; 

Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes, 
He stared at the Pacific; and all his men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise, 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 

When Spenser first sent forth the "Faerie Queene," 
not one of these contemporary poets had begun to 
publish. When he died, in 1599, there were other 
names, too, lesser than his but still distinct. We have 
touched on Daniel and Drayton, on Southwell and 
Davies, on Hall and Marston, on Chapman, only to 
remind ourselves of a truth which, when we first gen- 
eralized our impression of Elizabethan poetry, was not 
quite so salient but that we might neglect it. That 
poetry was truly integral in all its spontaneous and 
versatile experimental enthusiasm. At the same time, 
each new poet was beginning to grow more individual, 
more distinctly separate from the rest. As you know 
them better, you begin to feel how swiftly the time 
was approaching when each man should have his own 
office. And thus considering and comparing them, 
you grow in the first place to feel more and more 
assured that, apart from the dramatists, Spenser alone 
attained lasting eminence; but that meanwhile two 



108 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

slightly later men were emerging with more distinct- 
ness than the rest. One of these is Ben Jonson — 
more nearly excellent as a poet than he was as a 
dramatist; the other, who wrote his poems at this 
time, though few seem to have been published till 
much later, is Donne. Before proceeding to what 
followed, we may best pause to consider these three 
dissimilar masters. 

In 1600, of course, Spenser was lately dead. Yet 
that very word seems inapt; for Spenser, the poet, is 
of those few who will never die. He had crowned 
the experiments of his early days with an achieve- 
ment in its own way unsurpassed. No doubt his 
stanza is of foreign origin, suggested by his delight 
in the poetry of Renascent Italy; but there can be no 
doubt, either, that in adapting this to English use he 
made it idiomatic. Spenser's verse, too, is idiomatic 
in spite of those deliberate, experimental archaisms 
and oddities of language which make his dialect un- 
like anything ever actually spoken. He had made this 
English, at last, an immortal instrument of beauty. 
On this aspect of his career we dwelt perhaps distract- 
ingly when we considered his relation to his prede- 
cessors. 

Yet mere form never made poetry live. Obscure, 
or at least bewildering, though Spenser be, when we 
strive to find our way through the fantasies he made 
alive with beauty, there can be no question that these 
very fantasies reveal a personality in the poet. Such 



POETRY 109 

impressions as those on which onr conception of his 
personality are based are elusively hard to summarize ; 
yet we must attempt some summary of them if we 
would definitely account for that lasting influence which 
began in Spenser's own time and has never quite 
lapsed. What makes him still the Poet's Poet is not 
only his beauty; it is partly the character which this 
beauty embodies. Gentle of heart he was ; courteous ; 
at once sensuous and unfleshly; and sincere in his 
purpose to make his utterances edifying. With this 
temper he faced the facts of his Elizabethan world. 
The deeds of men, in their actuality, were often base 
and ugly; the art of literature, which he was destined 
to master, was still in the making; and everywhere 
about him, in those days of enthusiastic experiment, 
affectation and merit were bewilderingly confused. 
As comments on life, accordingly, his poems are 
archaically, deliberately, almost painfully artificial ; 
his substance, whatever its ultimate veracity, is never 
simple, never spontaneous or inevitable in conception. 
Yet, beneath it all, you feel the spirit of one who 
would work for righteousness; who feels, with a gen- 
tleness all his own, that each man should strive in this 
world to make his life better, and more holy. Now 
this spirit, despite the sensuous beauty of its guise, 
is at heart that of the same English Reformation from 
which later sprang the nobler features of dominant 
Puritanism. Those are not all mistaken who find in 
Spenser deeper and deeper trace of what was deepest 



no THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in the spiritual life of his time. Puritan or not, it 
was with rare purity of spirit that he made those 
melodious stanzas. Yet, throughout them his unceas- 
ing amenity as an artist, his sensuous delight in beauty 
both of fancy and of phrase, embodied the nobler tem- 
per of the pagan Renaissance, too — that temper which 
loved beauty just for beauty's sake. Thus combining 
something of the purer spirit of the Renaissance with 
something of the purer spirit of the Reformation, he 
became, and has remained, a gentle guide to men who 
seek in either spirit, or in both, helpful solution of 
eternal mystery. 

From the beginning, accordingly, Spenser was des- 
tined to be not only a historical fact, but an influence; 
an influence, however, rather formal than substantial, 
for the reason that while his form was often excellent, 
his grasp of substance never had the firmness of sim- 
plicity. His very form, the while, had its palpable 
affectations, particularly in his deliberate archaisms 
and other oddities of phrase; it had its extreme man- 
nerisms, as well, such as his easily parodied excess 
of alliteration. And his followers imitated rather his 
peculiarities than his poetry. Of these later. What 
we have already remarked will go far to explain some 
careless comments on him by the most influential poet 
of immediately succeeding years. 

Among those tart notes of Ben Jonson's talk which 
Drummond made, some twenty years after Spenser 
died, are two or three remarks about Spenser. Here 



POETRY in 

is the first : "Spenser's stanzaes pleased him not, 
nor his matter ; the meaning of which Allegorie he 
had delivered in papers to Sir Walter Raughlie." 
The classical doctrine of Jonson, you see, had little 
patience with the Italianate graces which, by that 
time, Spenser's imitators had developed into newly 
conventional affectations; nor yet could Jonson pa- 
tiently submit to the obstacles which Spenser's alle- 
gory laboriously interposed between readers and mean- 
ing. For all that, as Drummond records a little later, 
Ben Jonson had "by heart some verses of Spenser's 
Calender about wyne." If these verses have been 
rightly identified, they show Jonson loyal to himself; 
for they are almost the least Spenserian in Spenser : 

Who ever casts to compasse weightye prise, 
And thinkes to throw out thondring words of threate, 
Let powre in lavish cups and thriftie bitts of meate, 
For Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise; 
And when with wine the brain e begins to sweate 
The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse. 

Years later, in the "Discoveries," Jonson touched 
on Spenser more deliberately. His objection to Spen- 
ser's manner remained unshaken, but he admitted the 
graces of Spenser's spirit. "Spenser," he wrote, "af- 
fecting the ancients, writ no language; yet I would 
have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read 
Ennius." Jonson seems to have stayed deaf to Spen- 
ser's melody, and true to his own hatred of affecta- 



ii2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tion — of any "humour" ; true, as well, to that love for 
purity of dialect which made him such a master of ver- 
nacular English. But he could feel, at last, the beauty 
of Spenser's spirit; and feel, too, what a treasure of 
elder tradition the Poet's Poet had gathered within 
the compass of his verse. 

I have cited these opinions of Jonson not because 
of their validity but because of the light they throw 
on the aspect in which the most memorable effect of 
Italian influence on Elizabethan poetry presented itself 
to the poet whose own work embodies the most ripe 
effect on that poetry of orthodox classical learning. 
We have already considered Jonson as a dramatist. 
Puzzling we found him among his contemporaries of 
the theatre. Almost everybody else followed and 
adapted the romantic conventions of the native Eng- 
lish stage. Jonson, on the other hand, maintained, 
with characteristic sturdiness, as much as he could 
of those classical principles to which the stages of 
France and Italy yielded. His plays, nevertheless, do 
not seem conventionally pseudo-classic; rather they 
seem at first completely, though oddly, Elizabethan. 
This apparent peculiarity we finally attributed to the 
fact that he was not only master of the classical con- 
ventions which he so stoutly maintained ; he was also, 
beyond almost any other writer of his day, a master 
of vernacular English. So he set forth his purposes 
not in pedantically conventional dialect, shunning 
"common and plebeian forms of speech," but in the 



POETRY 113 

vitally human terms which men actually used in deal- 
ing with one another. For purity of phrase, indeed, 
there are few English authors whose vocabulary, to 
this day, proves more trusty. If you find that Ben 
Jonson used a word, you may use it fearlessly still. 
His classicism, in the drama, was a matter rather of 
spirit than of language. At least, it never led him 
into phrases whose mere form betrayed it. 

In his dramas, no doubt, this somewhat paradoxical 
combination of classical spirit with vernacular style 
failed to produce a lastingly happy result. In the 
lyric poems on which we touch to-day, the result was 
quite the reverse. Jonson's lyrics are not only scat- 
tered through his plays and his masques. He wrote 
and collected a great many separate ones, very various 
in kind, in purpose, in merit; and more have been 
collected since his time. Throughout, these have just 
the characteristics which we found in his dramas. He 
was always animated by a belief, based on vitally 
sympathetic reading of the classics, that any given 
literary purpose should fall into some given form — 
that there was one single right way, as distinguished 
from all other ways, of expressing every single thing. 
Sometimes laboriously, sometimes more easily, he 
accordingly tried to make verses as they ought 
to be made with unfailing artistic conscience. And 
among the precepts which this conscience seems to 
have kept before him, two were constant. It was his 
business, he felt with the best classic of them all, to 



ii 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

be lucid; you shall search his volumes in vain for a 
line which shall really puzzle you. It was his duty, 
as well, when he wrote English to write that language 
and no other; you will be at pains to find in him any- 
where an unintentional departure from idiom. There 
are few styles anywhere more free than his from verbal 
ingenuity, from affectation of phrase. The humor 
which possessed him as a poet was chiefly composed of 
devotion to sound sense and pure language. 

These virtues were evident even in his plays. But 
his conscientious effort to compose plays throughout 
with orthodox precision, impeded such free range of 
imagination as often makes more vital the work of 
far less able men. And meanwhile the unwitting 
pedantry which lurked beneath the vernacular surface 
of his dialogue often made its temper puzzling. 
Again and again, while pretending, with full self- 
belief, to set forth an image of Renascent English life, 
he was really expressing the moods — and often trans- 
lating the very words — of satirists who lived and died 
despairing amid the decadence of antiquity. No won- 
der those labored and understanding works of his, 
exotic at heart, have been overgrown by the wild 
luxuriance of the native dramatic poetry which was 
springing up all around them. 

With his lyrics, as I have said, the case is different. 
When, as in plays, motives are complex, the conditions 
which make their utterance vital are apt to vary with 
the varying conditions of their historical environment : 



POETRY 115 

forms which suit one state of society often puzzle 
or bore a different one. When, as in aphorisms or 
in lyric verses, motives are essentially simple, the 
forms which suit them are apt to be, like funda- 
mental emotion, unchanging. The very impulse 
toward form which deadened Jonson's plays accord- 
ingly strengthened his lyric poems; and since these, 
like his plays, were always rendered in an English 
idiomatic as to phrase, to rhythm, and to metre, you 
will find his lyrics again and again on the verge of 
perfection. 

None of them is more characteristic than the most 
familiar : 

Drink to me only with thine eyes, 

And I wall pledge with mine; 
Or leave a kiss but in the cup, 

And I'll not ask for wine. 
The thirst, that from the soul doth rise, 

Doth ask a drink divine. 
But might I of Jove's nectar sup, 
I would not change for thine. 

Both this stanza and the other are almost literally 
translated from scattered passages in the letters of 
Philostratus. That immortally English opening line, 
for example, is simply an English version of the 
Greek phrase : 

*E/xot 8e /iovots irpoTnvt tois ofiftaaiv. 

What Jonson has done is to compose in such ex- 
quisite order the stray sentences which he culled from 



n6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the prose of a Greek rhetorician, and to phrase them 
in an English so exquisitely pure that we need effort 
to feel that Jonson's art in this case was not spon- 
taneous but laboriously understanding. One or two 
less familiar examples must serve to show on the 
one hand his deference to his ancient masters, and 
on the other hand how the spirit that was in him 
expressed itself more freely. Among his epigrams 
is one addressed to the Ghost of Martial: 

Martial, thou gav'st far nobler epigrams 
To thy Domitian than I can my James; 
But in my royal subject I pass thee, 
Thou flatter' dst thine, mine cannot flatter'd be. 

Here, no doubt, you have Jonson at his laborious 
worst; but a little earlier in the same collection come 
the nearly faultless lines he wrote in memory of his 
little child, Mary: 

At six months' end she parted hence 

With safety of her innocence; 

Whose soul heaven's Queen, whose name she bears, 

In comfort of her mother's tears, 

Hath placed amongst her virgin train; 

Where, while that, severed, doth remain, 

This grave partakes the fleshly birth; 

Which cover lightly, gentle earth! 

Already we have enough to show us the mood and the 
power of the poet who could sturdily assert, in his cups, 



POETRY 117 

that Shakspere wanted art, and could deliberately set 
down in his note-book that Spenser writ no language. 
In creative power he never approached either; but in 
faithful obedience to the orthodox mandates of his ar- 
tistic conscience he accomplished lyric work so beautiful 
that even by itself it could have established and main- 
tained authority. And this authority, whatever else, 
would have kept those who accepted it from extrava- 
gance or error. If no daring guide, Jonson would 
always have been a safe one; and a safe guide he 
proved. His leadership, however, was not all due to 
his work; in no slight degree it was a question of his 
personality combined with the circumstances and the 
length of his career. He made his sturdy way, every- 
one knows, from obscurity, through the theatres, to 
the laureateship which he held so long. Few men 
of his time had wider opportunity for acquaintance 
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the vagrants 
of London streets to royalty itself. He was of con- 
vivial habit, too, with a quick, assertive temper of 
his own ; eager to mingle with any company, to cross 
swords or bludgeons of wit with whoever would meet 
him; hastily quarrelsome, never rancorous, stoutly 
assertive; ready, as the old phrase goes, with a kiss 
or a blow. When he was reconciled to the Church 
of England he drained the communion-cup to prove 
his sincerity. And so, with the years, he gathered 
about him such a company of friends and of disciples 
as has been paralleled in the records of English litera- 



n8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ture only by that which gathered about his great 
namesake of the eighteenth century. 

Like any influence in literature of which those who 
feel it are aware, this influence of Jonson's personality 
and of his work tended to grow formal. What made 
Jonson great was the abiding and pervasive power 
of his artistic conscience. What his disciples imitated 
was rather the superficial polish of his lyric achieve- 
ment. Of his disciples we shall reason later; yet one 
phase of Jonson's influence, not so evident as that of 
his lyric masterpieces, we may touch on now. With 
him, classicism meant only the expression of sound 
sense in pure language. One is hardly apt, accord- 
ingly, to group him with the deliberate pseudo-classic 
writers of later times, who imposed on English the 
bondage of the heroic couplet. And yet you can find 
the germs of their spirit in his. His overwhelming 
vernacular impulse was a natural result — I had almost 
said a phase — of the eager experimentation which ani- 
mated all true Elizabethan poetry. As the early days 
passed from life into tradition, this enthusiastic im- 
pulse was bound to flag. And so, one may see, the 
the rigidity of form which did not finally cramp lit- 
erature until long after they had buried Jonson up- 
right in Westminster Abbey, was after all the normal 
outgrowth of his artistic conscience, passed from vital- 
ity into the rigidity of formal creed. 

As a man of letters, and a scholar too, whose princi- 
ples took the shape of doctrine, Jonson was natu- 



POETRY 119 

rally a decided, though not a finally trustworthy, critic 
of his contemporaries. He read omnivorously, and 
digested whatever he read, at least enough to reduce 
the results of his reading to the form of concrete opin- 
ion. Expressed, now and again, in his published works, 
these comments on his fellow writers appear most 
characteristically in Drummond's notes of his casual 
talk. He touched on a great many English poets of 
his time, but on none other so often as on the most 
eccentric of all, John Donne. Whether this emphasis 
came of Jonson's own motion or because of questions 
from Drummond, we can never know; but some of 
Jonson's dicta have become as familiar as they are 
emphatic. 

"He esteemeth John Done," writes Drummond, 
"the first poet in the world in some things;" some 
of Donne's verses, Drummond adds, Jonson had by 
heart; and he concludes by noting Jonson's assertion 
that Donne wrote "all his best pieces ere he was twen- 
ty-five years old" — that is, before 1598. In another 
note is set down Jonson's famous assertion on the 
other side, "That Done, for not keeping of accent, 
deserved hanging." Elsewhere is Jonson's mistaken, 
though defensible, prophecy, "That Done, . . . for 
not being understood, would perish ;" elsewhere, again, 
is a suggestion that this fault was sometimes sportive, 
for "Done said to him, he wrott that Epitaph on 
Prince Henry, Look to me Faith to match Sir Ed : 
Herbert in obscurenesse" — a feat which he accom- 



i2o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

plished. Finally, in fact though not in place, comes 
the statement that Donne "now, since he was made 
Doctor, repenteth highlie, and seeketh to destroy all 
his poems." Incidentally, Jonson twice alluded to his 
own critical comment on Horace's "Art of Poetry," 
the manuscript of which was accidentally destroyed 
later; this took the form of a dialogue, in which 
"by Criticus," one of the interlocutors, "is under- 
stood Done." We may fairly infer, I think, that the 
literary doctrine of Donne was in heretical contra- 
diction to the robust orthodoxy of Jonson; and that 
the lost dialogue triumphantly confuted this excess 
of artistic Protestantism. 

At all events, though many of Donne's poems were 
long unpublished, his works were familiar in manu- 
script to his literary contemporaries; and, whatever 
else, they were recognized as the most individual of 
his time. Spenser frankly set forth in English poetry 
the influence of classical Italian. Jonson sturdily ex- 
pounded and practised the permanent poetic principles 
of the enduring classics of antiquity. Donne wrote 
with utter disregard of both these influences; and, 
although he was manifestly influenced by the decadent 
ingenuities which had become fashionable in Italy and 
in Spain, his English manner was, almost rudely, his 
own. 

Walton's first published biography was a life of 
Donne, made for an edition of his sermons. The 
emphasis here is all on his later days of grave divinity, 



POETRY 121 

but enough is set down to show how he was an infant 
prodigy of precocity ; how he lived a wild youth, which 
bore fruit in much poetic utterance; how he made 
a romantically imprudent marriage; how, partly as a 
measure of worldly wisdom, he took orders; how he 
became a powerful preacher, and was made Dean of 
St. Paul's ; and how, during his last illness, he fan- 
tastically had himself swathed in a winding-sheet, and 
stood, with closed eyes, for that grim portraiture of 
death which was carved in marble for his monument, 
which survived the Great Fire, and which may still 
be seen in St. Paul's, among the few relics of the 
Elizabethan cathedral. 

The Donne with whom we are concerned is not this 
grave and reverend Doctor of Divinity, who sought 
in his later years to destroy his poems. The Donne 
who touches us is the poet, whose verses have been 
collected, and persist in spite of him. To us they 
cannot have the sort of surprising quality which, in 
their own day, attracted instant attention. So far as 
I can discover, their approach to popularity came not 
so much from their aggressive peculiarity of form as 
from the fact that, in contrast to the literature about 
them, they must have appeared amazingly veracious. 
Their lack of conventional grace, when other men were 
so apt to be conventionally graceful, makes them seem 
astonishingly genuine : they seem to express not fancy, 
but fact, and in a temper very like that of the art 
which modern cant calls realistic. 



122 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

In their own day, this spirit of realism was almost 
unprecedented ; yet if this were all which made Donne 
memorable, he would be of hardly more than histor- 
ical interest. And his fame, whether we care for him 
or not, is proving permanent. We must look a little 
closer; facing and trying to penetrate the surface of 
his obscurity. Sometimes, as in that epitaph on 
Prince Henry, this obscurity was mischievously de- 
liberate : 

Look to me, faith, and look to my faith, God; 
For both my centres feel this period. 
Of weight one centre, one of greatness is; 
And reason is that centre, faith is this. 

Yet even here one can feel the man's lasting power. 
Thoughtful to the degree of an over-ingenuity which 
here he frankly parodies — Herbert, and Greville, to 
name no more, had already been more ingenious still — 
he always manages to express himself also with a 
surgent, yet repressed, emotional power which makes 
him, among the poets of his time, the most intense. 
His obscurity is not a matter of language; his vocabu- 
lary is almost as pure as Jonson's own. The difficul- 
ties of him spring rather from this pervasive intensity, 
which strives, deliberately or instinctively, to charge 
his lines with a heavier burden of thought and feeling 
than any lines could unbendingly carry. Accordingly 
he seems, once for all, to disdain the oddities into 
which the lines distort themselves under the strain. 



POETRY 123 

You can feel this peculiarity almost everywhere. 
Among his earlier poems are the "Satires," in every 
sense the least palpably conventional, and so appar- 
ently the most genuine, of his time and perhaps of 
our language. Here is a bit from one of them, which 
chances still to be repeatable: 

Gracchus loves all as one, and thinks that so 

As women do in divers countries go 

In divers habits, yet are still one kind, 

So doth, so is religion; and this blind- 

Ness too much light breeds. But unmoved thou 

Of force must one, and forced but one allow; 

And the right. Ask thy father which is she; 

Let him ask his. Though Truth and Falsehood be 

Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is. 

For not keeping of accent, no doubt Donne deserved 
hanging; but he could plead in confession and avoid- 
ance this intensity which was all his own. 

He never lost it, furthermore; rather he developed 
it. In his graver years, for example, just when Web- 
ster was publishing that preface to the "White Devil, " 
Donne's intensity produced such lines as these : 

The world is but a carcass; thou art fed 

By it, but as a worm that carcass bred ; 

And why shouldst thou, poor worm, consider more 

When this world will grow better than before, 

Than those thy fellow-worms do think upon 

That carcass's last resurrection? 



i2 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

You cannot but feel the intense genuineness of this 
comparison. At the same time, its exasperating over- 
ingenuity is just of the kind which Dr. Johnson so 
stoutly belabored in his comments on the figure of the 
compass, to which, long before, Donne had likened the 
souls of two lovers : 

If they be two, they are two so 

As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 

To move, but doth, if th' other do. 

And though it in the centre sit, 
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 

It leaves, and hearkens after it, 

And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must 

Like th' other foot obliquely run; 
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 

And makes me end where I begun. 

In both of these passages, over-ingenious though 
they be, you can feel the power of Donne. In neither, 
nor in anything we have glanced at yet, can you 
feel the vividness or the beauty which now and again 
consecrates this power. For an example of his vivid- 
ness, take those lines from the "Calm," which Jonson 
had by heart: 

No use of Ian thorns; and in one place lay 
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday. 



POETRY 125 

For an example of his beauty, take stray lines from the 
love-lyrics, generally so far from austerity that there 
need be no wonder why Donne regretted them in his 
reverend days. Yet, even at his sternest, he need not 
have cast away such stanzas as this : 

O, do not die, for I shall hate 

All women so, when thou art gone, 

That thee I shall not celebrate, 
When I remember thou wast one. 

Better, still, take the haunting melody of those two 
lines of Donne which are most familiar — so familiar, 
indeed, as to be almost hackneyed : 

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, 
Who died before the god of love was born. 

Already we have dwelt on him more than enough to 
feel that intensity of individuality which made his 
work in his own time seem real beyond the rest, and 
which, with all its disdain of amenity, makes his verse 
in these days of ours reveal more and more to those 
who ponder it most. 

Intense individuality, the while, is of all artistic 
influences the most destructive. Crescent art any- 
where is that which is rooted in immemorial conven- 
tion. Art which deliberately contradicts tradition is 
bound, however genuine, to be a noble heresy. The 
heresiarchs have something delusively like the virtue 
of the saints. It is only when we trace the extinction 



126 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of their followers that we can feel the tragedy of their 
faithful and honest aberrations. The influence of 
Spenser could never quite lose the amenity of his 
Italianate grace; that of Jonson could never quite lose 
the civility of his classical poise; that of Donne was 
bound to fall into the affectations of a mannerism 
which grew lifeless the moment the master who vital- 
ized it fell asleep. 

Analogies are doubtless misleading, and those critics 
are right who have objected to the commonplace which 
has asserted that Donne was an Elizabethan Brown- 
ing. Yet there is a suggestion of truth in the ex- 
tended analogy — whose very imperfections help to 
correct its errors — which would liken in their mutual 
relations the three divergent Elizabethans on whom 
we have now touched to three eminent poets of the 
nineteenth century. Spenser was less like Wordsworth 
than Jonson was like Tennyson; and Jonson was less 
like Tennyson than Donn'e was like Browning; and 
Donne was, on the whole, so little like Browning that 
the comparison by itself is rather misleading than help- 
ful. Yet when Spenser died, in 1599, Jonson and 
Donne were already pointing the ways in which Eliza- 
bethan poetry must disintegrate, very much as, when 
Wordsworth died, in 1850, Tennyson and Browning 
were already pointing the divergent ways in which 
the English poetry of the nineteenth century has be- 
gun to lose what integrity it ever had. If we liken 
Spenser to Wordsworth, accordingly, and Jonson to 



POETRY 127 

Tennyson, and Donne to Browning, we may feel — for 
all the dissimilarities which must often obscure all trace 
of similarity — what those mean who believe, in our 
day, that human expression must yield to natural law as 
surely as the stars in their courses. 

For, though it would be foolish to say that Spenser, 
and Jonson, and Donne caused the disintegration of 
Elizabethan poetry, there can be no doubt, I think, 
that the three distinct tendencies, or influences, em- 
bodied in the work of these three divergent masters 
portend, with precision, the courses which that poet- 
ical disintegration was to take. 



\ 

THE DISINTEGRATION OF LYRIC POETRY 



In approaching this consideration of the separate 
literary tendencies which found expression in Spenser, 
in Ben Jonson, and in Donne, I touched on the fact 
that the ensuing disintegration of English poetry was 
an example of how natural law revealed its power 
even in so subtly human a matter as the development 
and the decline of literature. Yet no man has been 
able to formulate the laws which dominate human 
expression — perhaps in their complexity beyond the 
range of generalization. And taking refuge in such 
half-truths, misleading if we believe them wholly, as 
marked the slow waking of science from chaos, men 
are apt nowadays to class this poet or that as if he 
were some monstrous creature of Jonsonian humor. 
We talk of the influence of Spenser much as the old 
astrologers prated of what they fancied the literal in- 
fluence of a planet. We are apt to be more neglectful 
still of complex truth; more unwilling, indeed, than 
our astrologic forbears, to admit, without discontent, 
how influences must forever intermingle. That the 
early years of the seventeenth century produced poets 
who reverently imitated Spenser everyone knows; so 

128 



POETRY 129 

we are apt to call them Spenserian — as if imitation 
of Spenser were all their story. One or two familiar 
passages should warn us of our danger. Among the 
poets commonly described as Spenserian were William 
Browne, of Tavistock; Giles Fletcher, and George 
Wither. 

Browne surely held Spenser his master, writing of 
him thus : 

He sung the heroic knights of Fairy-land 

In lines so elegant, of such command, 

That had the Thracian played but half so well, 

He had not left Eurydice in Hell. 

But ere he ended his melodious song 

An host of angels flew the clouds among, 

And rapt this swan from his attentive mates, 

To make him one of their associates 

In Heaven's fair quire. 

And, writing pastorally, Browne could follow Spen- 
ser's manner very closely. Take, for example, lines 
like these: , 

As when a woodman on the greeny lawns, 
Where daily chants the sad-sweet nightingale, 

Would count his herd, more bucks, more prickets, fawns 
Rush from the copse and put him from his tale; 

So when my willing muse would gladly dress 

Her several graces in immortal lines, 
Plenty empoors her. 

Superficially this might be mistaken for Spenser; 
but, looking a little closer, you will observe how the 



i 3 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

oddities of Spenser's vocabulary have given place to 
a purity of phrase almost like Jonson's. You can dis- 
cern, too, in Browne's final paradox a suggestion of 
"metaphysical poetry." And so, perhaps, you will 
not feel the wonder we are apt to feel at first when 
we are forced to admit that in all probability it was 
not Jonson, but this Spenserian Browne, who wrote 
that beautiful little epitaph: 

Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse: 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother: 
Death, ere thou hast slain another, 
Fair, and learned, and good as she 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. 

Again, the very opening pages of Giles Fletcher's 
"Christ's Victorie in Heaven" contain line after line 
which prove him Spenserian. Take the fourth stanza : 

Ye Sacred writings, in whose antique leaves 
The memories of Heaven entreasured lie, 
Say, what might be the cause that Mercie heaves 
The dust of sin above the industrious skie, 
And lets it not to dust and ashes flie? 

Or take the sixth stanza, with its clear allusion to the 
last lines of the "Faerie Queene" : 

There is a place beyond that flaming hill, 

From whence the starres their thin appearance shed; 

A place beyond all place, where never ill, 



POETRY 131 

Nor impure thought was ever harbored, 

But saintly heros are forever s'ed 

To keepe an everlasting Sabbaoth's rest. 

Here is Spenser, no doubt, his music harshened but 
audible still; yet here, too, are Jonsonianly English 
words, in place of that "no language" which Spenser 
writ. And the paradoxes with which Fletcher begins 
the poem indicate more metaphysical influence than 
you can trace anywhere in Browne: 

The birth of him that no beginning knewe, 

Yet gives beginning to all that are borne; 

And how the Infinite far greater grew 

By growing less, and how the rising Morne 

That shot from heav'n, did back to heav'n retourne: 

The obsequies of Him that could not die, 

And death of life, end of eternitie, 

How worthily He died, that died unworthily; — 

Is the first flame, wherewith my whiter Muse 
Doth burne in heavenly love, such love to tell. 

A case might be made out from these lines that Giles 
Fletcher was a follower rather of Donne. 

In Wither's Pastorals, too, are fainter echoes of 
Spenser in plenty; the music has lost its melody, but 
not its rhythm. Yet what makes Wither a living poet 
are not these pastorals, nor yet his somewhat pale 
satires; and surely it is not the flood of devout verse 
which welled from him in his later years. It is that 
single song of his earlier days : 



132 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Shall I, wasting in despair 
Dye, because a woman's fair? 

And this is neither Spenserian, nor quite an utterance 
of the Tribe of Ben, nor yet metaphysical. It is 
rather a sporadic survival of that spirit which made 
integral, and not disintegrating, the lyrics of the spa- 
cious days themselves. 

To call this group of poets Spenserian, accordingly, 
meaning thereby that they echoed nobody but Spenser, 
might well seem mistaken; just as it might seem to 
assert that the Tribe of Ben included no man who did 
not yield himself body and soul to that robust chief; 
or still more, as it might to pretend that poets in 
whose lines we can detect "metaphysical" ingenuities 
were all disciples only of Donne. And yet the use 
of these three divergent terms, so frequent in discus- 
sions of English poetry from the accession of King 
James to the death of Charles I., points to a real 
fact. Up to the time when Spenser's individuality 
finally declared itself, English poetry seemed integral 
in spirit — marked chiefly by the spontaneous enthu- 
siasm of its versatile and winsome experiment. A 
very little later than Spenser, there emerged, side by 
side, the almost equally distinct figures of Jonson and 
of Donne, very different from each other, different 
as well from Spenser, but like him and like each other 
in the fact that each of them brought to a point be- 
yond that where their predecessors had left it the 
kind of poetry which he made peculiarly his own. 



POETRY 133 

With them, in brief, experiment came to the dignity 
of mastery ; and, as we look at their work in historical 
perspective, their individualities stand out more and 
more distinctly. 

With the poets who swiftly followed them, the case 
is different. It is not that these were only conscious 
imitators, nor yet that many of them deliberately imi- 
tated one master, and only one. These later poets, 
besides, prove, when one ponders over them with care, 
to have distinct individualities of their own. But of 
all together, the fact remains evident that none has 
an individuality so distinct as instantly to impress us. 
Rather we feel at first that each is no longer experi- 
mental, but that he is openly or tacitly aware of how 
admirably the art he would practise has already been 
mastered; and that his task has therefore become dif- 
ferent from that which confronted the masters them- 
selves. Accepting their manners and their achieve- 
ments as models, as traditions, as conventions, he seems 
first of all one of their followers, and only second- 
arily himself. 

This is surely true of those poets commonly called 
Spenserian — Giles Fletcher and Phineas, we may take 
as types of them, with Browne and Wither. No 
doubt each of them deserves study in detail. Each 
has his beauties; each his faults; each something like 
a message of his own; each, too, his somewhat intri- 
cate relations with the men about him and with the 
future, as well as with their common master. We 



134 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

might remark, for example, how the Fletchers — Puri- 
tan in temper, though not extremely so in instant 
aspect — may be regarded as the link between Spenser 
and Milton. The subject-matter of Giles Fletcher's 
"Christ's Victories," and the Hell and Lucifer of 
Phineas Fletcher's "Apollyonists," to go no further, 
have such analogies to the great epic of Milton's later 
years that even for this alone the brothers would be 
memorable. We might touch on the fastidious culture 
of Browne, revealing itself not only in traces through- 
out his fluent work of how deeply and lovingly he had 
read our elder poets, from Chaucer down, but also in 
that exquisite care for phrase which has made more 
than one modern critic liken him to Keats. We might 
recall how Wither was first a royalist and then a parlia- 
mentarian; how he repented of the amatory verse of 
his earlier years; how his rather mild satires got him 
into disproportionate trouble; how his pastoral poems 
are the most deeply marked with the imprint of his 
Elizabethan master; and how the floods of sacred and 
occasional verse which followed have now and again a 
simplicity or a commonplaceness, or oftener both, not 
wholly unlike what make so tedious the inexhaustible 
productions which poured from Wordsworth after his 
inspiration was exhausted. More, too, and more — 
merits and faults alike — we could doubtless find in 
one and all. More names, too, we might doubtless 
mention. Yet, when all was done, and we strove to 
render ourselves account of what we had thus scru- 



POETRY 135 

tinized in detail, the facts which we should finally 
remember are probably those which have caused critics 
to group these men together. 

On the whole, they impress us as disciples chiefly 
of Spenser — as practitioners of the art which his 
adventurous experiment discovered. Spenser him- 
self, in the full Elizabethan days, imitated Italian 
models; but his achievement was so gloriously his 
own that no reader of Spenser ever thinks of 
those models as primary. His followers imitated 
him — perhaps as freely, to their own minds, as 
he had imitated his own masters. With them, 
nevertheless, for all their individuality, you always 
think first of Spenser. He remains dominant; what 
the Spenserians themselves accomplished seems only 
secondary. And so, when we further remember that 
this Spenserian poetry was at its height in the time 
of King James I. — when Beaumont and Fletcher dom- 
inated the stage, and when Webster's work was begin- 
ning, and Ford's and Massinger's, too — we have said 
of the Spenserians what makes them chiefly significant 
in our present study. 

It was in King James's time that Ben Jonson was 
at his best and most potent; at that same time, too, 
the poems of Donne, mostly written earlier and mostly 
published later, were growing more and more familiar 
in private copies. The influence of each, no doubt, 
steadily increased; but the full effect of each did not 
instantly appear. In Professor Schelling's excellent 



136 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

introduction to the volume of "Seventeenth Century 
Lyrics," with which he supplemented his "Elizabethan 
Lyrics," he points out how the poems which have the 
distinctive quality of the new century hardly began 
before 1625. The poets who are regularly grouped in 
the Tribe of Ben were not at their best until fifteen or 
twenty years later. 

It was twelve years after the accession of King 
Charles, indeed, that his sturdy Elizabethan laureate 
died. Early in the following year, 1638, appeared 
a volume of memorable poems by many of his admir- 
ing disciples. The names of the contributors to this 
"Jonsonus Virbius; or, the Memory of Ben Jonson 
revived by the Friends of the Muses," suggest at once 
the numbers of the school he had founded, the breadth 
of its social and intellectual range, and the slight 
poetic eminence which most of its members attained. 
In general, the makers of these perfunctory occasional 
verses in the dead master's manner are of only his- 
torical importance. Lord Falkland opens the volume 
with a long eclogue. Then come ten lines by Lord 
Buckhurst; then longer series of couplets by Sir John 
Beaumont and Sir Thomas Hawkins; Henry King 
follows, and Henry Coventry, and Thomas May, and 
Dudley Diggs, and George Fortescue. Then, at last, 
William Habington reminds us that we are still within 
the confines of literature; and next comes a page of 
couplets by Waller, followed by five more couplets 
bearing the signature of James Howell. John Vernon, 



POETRY 137 

e Societ In Temp, who comes next, takes us back no- 
where. Cleveland, who follows him with a gleam of 
familiar light, seems to have written two poems — one 
signed only with his initials. J. Mayne then contributes 
the longest item since Falkland's eclogue. And so on. 
These are the ensuing names : W. Cartwright, Jo. Rut- 
ter, Ow. Feltham, George Donne, Shackerly Marmion, 
John Ford, R. Brideoake, Richard West, R. Meade, 
and H. Ramsay. Sir Francis Wortley, by way of 
variety, then contributes a Latin epitaph ; he is followed 
by a few other Latin versifiers, and by a final anony- 
mous set of verses in Greek. Of all these latter names, 
the only one instantly familiar to modern readers of 
poetry is that of Ford. The list, as a whole, rather com- 
ically reminds one of that in which, two centuries later, 
Edgar Allan Poe brought together the names of the 
Literati — now otherwise extinct — who illuminated in 
1840 the literature of New York. For the Tribe of 
Ben, so far as it still lives, we shall have to look 
elsewhere than among these lucid and lifeless makers 
of lines to his memory. 

The best remembered among his disciples are three 
courtiers of King Charles — Carew, Suckling, and 
Lovelace — who made graceful verses for fashion's 
sake; and the solitary Robert Herrick, on whom we 
shall touch a little later. Of the three courtier poets, 
Carew was the eldest, on the whole the best, and the 
least salient. He could write after Donne, when he 
chose ; witness the opening of the elegy he made to 
Donne's memory: 



138 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Can we not force from widow'd Poetry, 

Now thou art dead, great Donne, one Elegy 

To crown thy Hearse? Why yet did we not trust, 

Though with unkneaded, dough-baked prose, thy dust; 

Such as the unsizar'd Lecturer, from the flower 

Of fading Rhetoric, short-lived as his hour, 

Dry as the sand that measures it, might lay 

Upon the ashes on the funeral day? 

Witness, too, the extravagance of Carew's occasional 
conceits : 

Oh, whither is my fair Sun fled 

Bearing his light, not heat, away? 
If thou repose in the moist bed 

Of the Sea Queen, bring back the day 
To our dark clime, and thou shalt lie 
Bathed in the sea, flows from mine eye. 

But he mostly followed Jonson, yet with something 
effeminate always weakening the virility of the ac- 
knowledged master. In a Prologue to Jonson's "New 
Inn," after touching on Ben's detractors, he closes his 
panegyric thus : 

Thou art not of their rank, the quarrel lies 
Within thine own verge: then let this suffice — 
The wiser world doth greater Thee confess 
Then all men else, than thy se'f only less. 

And the grace of Carew's verse, sentimentally femin- 
izing Jonson's, you can feel in stanzas like this: 

Ask me no more where Jovt bestows, 
When June is past, the fading rose? 



POETRY 139 

For in your Beauty's orient deep 
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. 

Ask me no more, whither do stray 
The golden atoms of the day? 
For in pure love heaven did prepare 
These powders to enrich thy hair. 

Better still, perhaps, you will feel at once his rela- 
tion to Jonson and the limits of it in his epitaphs. 
Here is a bit from that to Lady Mary Wentworth, 
who died at eighteen : 

Good to the Poor, to kindred dear, 
To servants kind, to friendship clear, 
To nothing but herself severe; 

So, though a virgin, yet a Bride 
To every grace, she justified 
A chaste Polygamy, and died. 

There are graces here which Jonson could hardly 
have excelled, and a conceit which Donne could not 
have parodied. That same conceit meanwhile typifies 
— enough for us — the decadent eroticism which by 
this time had invaded not only the drama but lyric 
poetry as well. 

Carew was tolerably even. With Suckling and 
Lovelace the case is different. The good work of 
each is rare enough to be memorably salient. One 
or two of Suckling's lyrics are still familiar: 



i 4 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Why so pale and wan, fond lover? 

Prithee why so pale? 
Will, when looking well can't move her, 

Looking ill prevail? 

Prithee why so pale? 

Everyone knows that stanza; this, too: 

Out upon it, I have loved 

Three whole days together, 
And am like to love three more, 

If it prove fair weather. 

In these one feels a touch of Jonson's grace; but it is 
weakened by careless triviality. And a less familiar 
stanza of Suckling's indicates his relation to Jonson 
with odd precision. Remember "Drink to me only 
with thine eyes," and then listen to this sweetly feeble 
echo of it: 

I prithee send me back my heart, 

Since I cannot have thine; 
For if from yours you will not part 

Why then shouldst thou have mine? 

A feeble Son of Ben he was after all. And so, in 
general, Lovelace seems, too ; but the one lasting poem 
of Lovelace approaches perfection more nearly than we 
can quite realize without a momentary comparison of 
its second line with the figure he stole from one of 
Habington's stanzas to "Roses in the Bosom of 
Castara" : 



POETRY 141 

Ye blushing virgins happy are 

In the chaste nunn'ry of her breasts, 

For he'd prophane so chaste a fair, 
Who e'er should call them Cupid's nests. 

A single glance is enough for such sentimentality as 
that; it is the glory of Lovelace that when the stress 
of the Civil Wars was at hand, he was stirred to that 
one utterance of his which no degree of repetition can 
tarnish : 

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, 

That from the nunnery 
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 

To war and arms I fly. 

True, a new mistress now I chase, 

The first foe in the field; 
And with a stronger faith embrace 

A sword, a horse, a shield. 

Yet this inconstancy is such 

As you too shall adore: 
I could not love thee, dear, so much 

Loved I not honour more. 

Such was the Tribe of Ben at its best — all but 
Herrick, of whom by and by. They kept the sense 
of form which he had wrested from his classics; they 
lost his virile muscularity; they sentimentalized his 
graces, weakening them, too, with occasional "meta- 
physical" fancies; but they had a charm which might 
seem their own, if we were not so sure that its secret 



142 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

came from Jonson as straight as the rhythm of the 
Spenserians came from the "Shepherd's Calendar" 
and the "Faerie Queene." 

Throughout our swift scrutiny of both we must 
have felt traces of that over-ingenuity — that "meta- 
physical" elaboration of conceit — which is generally 
traced to the influence of Donne. The Spenserians 
thus seem not only to follow Spenser, with harshen- 
ing variations of his music; the Tribe of Ben seems 
not only to follow Jonson, with steps lacking the 
firmness of his virility ; but both seem to follow Donne 
as well, with little trace of the intensity which was 
his own justification. Something of Jonson's influ- 
ence, more, too, of Spenser's, shows itself in the work 
of that other group of poets which is sometimes called 
"metaphysical," as if Donne had been their only mas- 
ter. The religious poets, I mean, of whom perhaps 
the most typical are George Herbert and Vaughan 
and Crashaw. Each and all had an intensity which 
makes intensity seem the chief characteristic of this 
diverse yet distinct group. You will feel this in- 
stantly in some familiar lines from Vaughan, — the 
first concerning earth, the second concerning heaven. 
Of the world he writes : 

I saw Eternity the other night 

Like a great ring of pure and endless light, 

All calm, as it was bright; 
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, 

Driv'n by the spheres, 



POETRY 143 

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world 
And all her train were hurled. 

Here is something like an intricate variation on some 
melody of Spenser, sweetening, yet not weakening, 
that intensity and ingenuity which makes many critics 
name Vaughan, for all his spiritual individuality, a 
mere follower of Donne. Of heaven he writes with a 
simplicity like Jonson's, yet with a holy intensity of 
lyric feeling beyond any fire which ever emanated from 
Saint Ben: 

My soul, there is a country 

Afar beyond the stars, 
Where stands a winged sentry 

All skilful in the wars. 
There, above noise and danger, 

Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles, 
And one born in a manger 

Commands the beauteous files. 
If thou canst get but thither, 

There grows the flower of peace, 
The rose that cannot wither, 

Thy fortress and thy ease. 

Here is a new spirit — new not only in these studies 
of ours, but in all English poetry. Combining as they 
did that deep personal sense of religion and those 
austere ideals of personal purity which made the true 
strength of Puritanism with an exquisitely cultivated 
sense of beauty — like that which ennobled even the 
license of the Cavaliers — these religious poets, "meta- 



* 



144 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

physical," if you will, expressed beyond Spenserians 
or Sons of Ben, an everlasting truth. There are moods 
in which one feels them wonderful exponents of what 
preserves, among all the shocks and deadenings of 
human frailty, the diuturnity of the Church. But 
they were not only thus poets of a new spirit; they 
were also lingering followers of their Elizabethan 
masters. In their work, as surely as in that of their 
contemporaries at whom we have glanced before, one 
feels, when one pauses to define it in the perspective 
of the centuries, how the poetic form, even of their 
spiritual utterances, was inevitably influenced by the 
poetic forms of the generation before them. What 
is more, this intensity is strangely different from the 
integral enthusiasm of the times which they could 
almost remember. The fervor of Elizabethan poetry 
had in it something which seemed to emanate from the 
whole English nation. The fervor of the religious 
poets who were at their best under King Charles was 
only — though sincerely — individual. Each writes as 
one apart from the world. 

The English lyric never had such deep-rooted popu- 
lar life as the English drama; and so, in a way, the 
changes of the years affected it far less. You can 
transplant flowers and shrubs ; to uproot trees is fatal. 
Yet, in the history of other than dramatic poetry, we 
have traced a course like that which brought the 
drama to an end. This lyric poetry began, like the 
drama, with free, enthusiastic experiment, breaking 



POETRY 145 

from old conventions. Then came a moment of mas- 
tery. Then came the disintegration which could not 
help following from the separate manner of the diver- 
gent masters. The Elizabethans had made their new 
conventions; the later men must perforce submit to 
these new authorities. Whatever variety of beautiful 
detail the later poets might attempt, they could not 
help being increasingly conscious of the authority im- 
posed on them by the masterpieces already achieved 
in the manner which a generation before was new and 
free. And so, though without either the corruption 
or the servility which marked the decline of the stage 
from Shakspere to Shirley, we have found that 
English lyric poetry disintegrated, along with the 
drama, until — half unwittingly — we are far from the 
days when we could contentedly summarize the spirit 
of it in that single song of Campion's. 

It had arrived, in fact, at a point where, for coming 
men, the choice seemed to lie between exaggeration 
of newly grown conventions or deliberate reaction 
from them. In those very days both tendencies were 
evident. The seventeenth century had two poets of 
vast contemporary fame, whose work now seems so 
dead that we marvel how it could ever have been 
alive. One of these, Sir William Davenant, seems 
truly as hollow a sham as ever was his shameless 
sham bastardy. The other, Cowley, had a spark of 
the true fire, and perhaps more. In Milton's own 
day, good men held him Milton's better. But, like 



i 4 6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the shams of Davenant, the ingenious excesses of Cow- 
ley need detain us no longer thus when we have 
discerned in them examples of how soon conventions, 
when they are followed with servility, must prove 
lifeless. In these same years, as Mr. Gosse has pointed 
out so clearly, Waller, a poet partly of the Tribe of 
Ben, openly rejected the older conventions and marked 
— with poems of great historic interest — the course 
which English poetry was to take on its way to the 
couplet of Pope. Denham, too, one might recall a 
very little later, with his "Cooper's Hill," — that har- 
binger of the deep poetry of nature still to come, 
which Dryden once called "the exact standard of good 
writing." Historically important though they be, 
however, none of these seem precisely the most typical 
man of their time. In 1600, you will remember, I 
found my memory unconsciously selecting as typical 
a lyric of Campion's; in 1648 I find that my memory, 
with equal persistency, selects the work of that one 
follower in the Tribe of Ben whom I have therefore 
reserved till now — Robert Herrick. 

Partly, no doubt, this is a personal matter. When 
I turn to most of the poets of King Charles's time, 
I find myself willing to delight in their graces, but 
glad, after all, when the task of seeking those graces 
is done. Herrick, on the other hand, is never weari- 
some. A loyal son of Ben, delighting with a quiet 
zest all his own in the convivialities with which his 
robust master was apt to be surrounded, he was forced 



POETRY 147 

by chance into the solitude of a country parsonage. 
The "Noble Numbers" prove him not faithless to 
his spiritual duties; here is the first stanza of them 
on which my eye chances to fall : 

Lord, I am like to mistletoe, 
Which has no root, and cannot grow 
Or prosper but by that same tree 
It clings about; so I by Thee. 

But it is not thus that one thinks of him. He generally 
seems the sportive parson, ready out of hours to take 
simple, gay, pensive delight in the trivialities which 
can console country solitude. So he sang his little 
songs of pleasure in country sports, in fruits and 
flowers, in pretty girls; and through them all runs 
something like a bird's note — exquisite, untiring, 
sweetly repetitory, always ready to begin afresh. 

One can feel it in that little quatrain from the 
"Noble Numbers." One can feel it in his fantastic 
little "Prayer to Ben Jonson" : 

When I a verse shall make, 

Know I have pray'd thee, 
For old religion's sake, 

Saint Ben, to aid me. 
Make the way smooth for me, 

When I, thy Herrick, 
Knowing thee, on my knee 

Offer my lyric. 
Candles I'll give to thee, 

And a new altar, 
And then, Saint Ben, shalt be 

Writ in my psalter. 



148 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

One can feel Herrick's peculiar quality, more dis- 
tinctly still, in the lines, scattered through the Hesper- 
ides, which enshrine the pretty memory of his country 
servant : 

I 

Prew, my dearest maid, is sick 

Almost to be lunatic. 

iEsculapius, come and bring 

Means for her recovering; 

And a gallant cock shall be 

Offered up by her to thee. 

II 

These summer birds did with thy master stay 
The times of warmth, but then they flew away, 
Leaving their poet, being now grown old, 
Exposed to all the coming winter's cold. 
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide 
As well the winter's as the summer's tide; 
For which thy love, live with thy master here, 
Not one, but all the seasons of the year. 

Ill 

Here, here I live with what my board 
Can with the smallest cost afford. 
Though ne'er so mean the viands be, 
They will content my Prew and me. 
Or pea, or bean, or wort, or beet, 
Whatever comes, content makes sweet. 
We bless our fortunes when we see 
Our own beloved privacy; 
And like our living, where we're known 
To very few, or else to none. 



POETRY 149 

And when at last she died, he made an epitaph for her 
which muses might have inspired through Saint Ben's 
own conduits : 

IV 
In this little urn is laid 
Prudence Baldwin, once my maid: 
-From whose happy spark here let 
Spring the purple violet. 

Yet one can feel that little quatrain to be not Jon- 
son's, but Herrick's. Browne's lines on the Countess 
of Pembroke are indistinguishable from lines by Ben. 
Herrick, devout worshipper of his pagan saint though 
he were, has left hardly a phrase which is not sweet 
with his own dainty, country melody. 

So, in his own way and in his own time, his verses 
spring to memory more and more. In miniature, in 
pretty statement and sweetly fantastic grace, he finally 
outdoes the master. One may well linger over him 
until one forget for a while all but the delight which 
never fails. Thus he becomes the poet of his time 
who, at least in my memory, seems, by unconscious 
selection, the most typical. 

If, with this aspect of Herrick in mind, we turn 
to compare him with poets who were typical of Eng- 
lish literature forty years before him, we shall find 
a startling contrast. There is no better way to show 
it than by reverting for a moment to the "Faerie 
Queene." In the midst of this first great outburst 
of our triumphant poetry — freed at last from the 



150 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

cramping distortions of the untamed old language 
from whose bondage it broke its way to life — there 
lies, half hidden, a lovely little song. Spenser, no 
doubt, translated it directly from Tasso, and Tasso 
had probably found in Ausonius what is now its most 
familiar phrase. But Spenser's translation is so ad- 
mirable that whoever reads it must instinctively think 
of it as if it were Spenser's own: 

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay: 
Ah! see, whoso faire thing doest fain to see, 

In springing flowre the image of thy day. 
Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee 
Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestie, 

That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may. 
Lo! see soon after how more bold and free 

Her bared bosom she doth broad display; 

Lo! see soon after how she fades and falls away. 

So passeth, in the passing of a day, 

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre; 
Ne more doth flourish after first decay, 

That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre 

Of many a lady, many a Paramoure; 
Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime 

For soone comes age that will ber pride deflowre; 
Gather the Rose of love whilest yet is time, 
Whilest loving thou mayest loved be with equall crime. 

You cannot fail to feel the likeness of those last four 
lines to the quatrain of Herrick which has chanced 
to become the most familiar of all he ever wrote: 



POETRY 151 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may 

Old time is still a-flying: 
And this same flower that smiles to-day 

To-morrow will be dying. 

The very likeness between these passages empha- 
sizes the still more evident contrast. And, taken to- 
gether, the likeness and the contrast imply the whole 
history of English poetry during the period of which 
we have been trying to render ourselves account. 
Fifty years and more apart, two English poets — each 
in his way a thorough man of his time — were at- 
tracted by the same sweetly sentimental fragment of 
dainty classical eroticism : 

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus, et nova pubes, 
Et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum, 

it runs in Ausonius. Each translated this into a 
form so deeply English that one is half surprised to 
find its origin in antiquity; and the two forms have 
a likeness which makes one guess that Spenser's lines 
may have haunted the memory of Herrick just as 
Tasso's version of the passage surely haunted the 
memory of Spenser. And Spenser made a "lovely 
lay," not lost but still not salient among the profuse 
beauties of his inexhaustible treasuries of poetry; and 
Herrick made a final little quatrain, far less grand in 
manner, and yet so much more near perfection that 
as one listens to his lines one feels them ultimate, in 
their exquisite harmony of spontaneity and intelli- 



152 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

gence. The old comparison recurs to mind. Spenser's 
verses are like a section of some vigorous tree, pushing 
its crest skyward; Herrick's are like an exquisite 
flower, blooming on some little branch so far from 
the centre of its life that its own perfection seems 
its whole excuse for being. Here growth can go no 
further. The true course of life lies elsewhere. Yet 
there are moments when one feels content with the 
flower alone, caring for the trunk which bore it only 
because of this final, fleeting burden of beauty. 

There is no such decadence here as we traced in 
the drama. When Spenser wrote, that more popular 
kind of poetry was in the full flush of its beginning; 
when Herrick's "Hesperides" was published, the faint 
copies of Shirley had already been suppressed for the 
six years which had followed the closing of the thea- 
tres. And, in spite of the gross eroticism and other 
extravagance which intruded themselves into lyric 
poetry, too, when the drama was so swiftly declining, 
the lyrics never sunk into a state of repellent decay. 
But by Herrick's time they had lost their old buoyant 
integrity of lyric impulse, which had made the elder 
poets seem first brethren and only secondarily individ- 
uals. Soon came divergence; this or that distinct 
tendency or master began to separate the younger 
poets into groups, not unfriendly or mutually distrust- 
ful, but no longer integral with one another. Of the 
masters three clearly surpassed the rest — Spenser, with 
his Italianate grace ; Jonson, with his assimilated classi- 



POETRY 153 

cism ; and Donne, with that intense individuality of 
which Carew could write: 

The Muses Garden, with pedantic weeds 
O'erspread, was purged by thee; the lazy seeds 
Of servile Imitation thrown away 
And fresh Invention planted 

Then came men of lesser range, of more narrow scope, 
each and all impelled chiefly by the influence which 
flowed from one or another of the masters. And so, 
when we think of Spenser and of Campion, in the 
elder days, we think of them first together and then 
apart. But when we think of the Spenserian Browne, 
for example, and of Vaughan with his metaphysical 
ecstasies, and of Herrick, loyal to the Tribe of Ben, 
we think of them first apart and then together. 

We have hardly mentioned the one great poet who 
was growing toward his maturity in these disintegrant 
times. For our purposes Milton is so important that 
we must by and by consider him alone. We have 
touched now on the poetical surroundings of his early 
days. Before we come to him we must touch on other 
surroundings too. 

But meanwhile we must not forget the chief purpose 
which brings us together; this is to trace, if we may, 
those changes in the national temper of England which 
made it, in Dryden's time, so different from what it 
was when the century began, and when English liter- 
ature was dominated by Shakspere. We have ren- 



154 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

dered ourselves, accordingly, some account of what 
Elizabethan temper was, in all the integrity of its 
spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile, literary experi- 
ment. Then we have considered the course of the 
drama, first disintegrant, later decadent to the point 
of extinction — bespeaking, above all things else, a loss 
of the old national integrity, a growth apart of some 
special race of play-goers, still delighting in traces of 
the elder splendors, but less and less able to discern 
the difference between stars and spangles. Next we 
have been considering the course which lyric poetry 
took the while; and, for all the truth and beauty 
which resided to the end in English lyrics, we found 
without precise decadence trace after trace of just 
such disintegration as preceded the decadence of the 
drama. The only truly new note which we have yet 
detected is in itself a widely, remotely specialized one, 
such as inspired the ecstatic solitude of Vaughan's 
religious utterances. This very individual solitude of 
the later poets implies the truth we should now keep 
most clearly in mind. In the days of King James 
and of King Charles, both lyric and dramatic poetry 
indicate how the national temper of England was no 
longer so deeply at one that any single poetic expres- 
sion could summarize it at all; and furthermore, how 
the robustness of the elder time had faded out of 
literature. Our next business must be to inquire how 
that national temper revealed itself, the while, in the 
less deliberately artistic vehicle of prose. 



VI 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROSE 

THE BIBLE AND BACON 

Perhaps inevitably, the abundance of material 
lately before us has a little obscured the purpose we 
are trying to follow. Our object is to trace, so far 
as we may, the processes by which the national temper 
of England changed during the seventeenth century, 
when its literature passed from the period of Shak- 
spere to that of Dryden. And these processes we must, 
of course, consider chiefly as they reveal themselves 
in literature. Now, literature we agreed to define as 
the lasting expression in words of the meaning of life. 
For us, accordingly, seventeenth century literature in- 
cludes not the whole production of the period, but 
only such parts of that production as the unconscious, 
instinctive selection of posterity has found memorable. 
That quality of duration, of lastingness, is essential 
to such matter as we have agreed to consider together. 

Nor is this unreasonable. As truly as one who 
looks at a landscape must take his stand in some one 
spot, from whence his surroundings fall into a per- 
spective true nowhere else, so, I think, a student of 
human affairs, who strives to see them in their mutual 

155 



156 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

relations, must choose the point of view from which 
he would regard them. Rather, perhaps, he must 
frankly recognize the point of view where circum- 
stances beyond his power place him. We are living, 
for example, in the first years of the twentieth cen- 
tury, and at this moment we are concerning ourselves 
with men who were alive, and with forces which were 
at work, three hundred years ago. So placed, there 
is before us a pretty clear alternative. Either we must 
painfully and studiously try to sweep back the tide 
of time until we can faintly revive some ghostly image 
of Elizabethan days, or else, admitting where and 
what we are, we must ask ourselves how these elder 
days appear to us, here and now, in the perspective 
of the centuries. 

The whole truth no man can ever know. Aspects 
of truth all men can see who will plant their feet and 
use their eyes. Of which aspects, when we turn our 
eyes to the past, none seem more certain than the 
names and the records which the present keeps in mind 
— the eminences which grow the more distinct for their 
very distance. What men have not forgotten is mem- 
orable just because it is remembered. 

Thus glancing back at the elder days, before our 
closer scrutiny should begin, we could see, perhaps 
more clearly than from any lesser distance of time, 
some features of that Elizabethan England from which 
have sprung the national tempers both of England and 
of our distinct America. In the days of Queen Eliza- 



PROSE 157 

beth, the national life of England had an integrity all 
its own ; Elizabethan literature had a freshness a spon- 
taneity, an enthusiasm which expressed itself chiefly in 
eagerness for versatile experiment. The bonds of the 
past had been weakened or broken; the bonds of the 
future were still unforged. And literature, surging 
with the power of aspiring, unchecked imagination, 
burst forth into a poetry which seems undying. The 
lyric achievement of those days was surpassed only by 
the dramatic ; and both lyric poetry and dramatic were 
so abundant that, when we came to render ourselves 
account of them in detail, their very abundance proved 
momentarily confusing. 

This abundance persisted when we asked ourselves 
next what course this poetry took in either way. 
Lyric poetry and dramatic alike we had seen to begin 
with spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile experiment. 
We chose to consider each apart. So, considering the 
drama, in its own transitory moment the most charac- 
teristic expression of the national integrity of Eliza- 
bethan England, we saw how its eager experiments 
resulted in the various manners which inventive men 
developed each for himself, and which Shakspere 
flexibly followed. We saw how swiftly the conscious- 
ness of this achievement imposed on the later men a 
sense of tradition which checked the freedom of ro- 
mantic play-writing, and made it finally obedient to 
freshly accepted conventions of its own. Meanwhile, 
we saw how corruption of temper invaded the stage, 



158 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

how fastidiousness and excess replaced the old spon- 
taneous ease and freedom. And so came the swift 
decline. Imaginative outburst came first; then came 
a little while when the surging force of imagination 
mingled nobly and vitally with the freshly developed 
sense of what could be achieved; finally came the 
time when a crushing sense of what had been achieved 
checked and repressed the force of the imaginative out- 
burst. And as the vigor, the health of the olden time 
declined, we could feel, half insensibly, how the frag- 
ment of disintegrating England to which the decadent 
stage still appealed was strangely without the whole- 
some, buoyant integrity of the days which were so 
lately past. The men who welcomed Shirley were 
of another stripe than their fathers, who had delighted 
in the full strength of Shakspere. 

Turning next to lyric poetry, we found its course 
similar, but different. Like the drama, it had its 
period of spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile Eliza- 
bethan integrity. Like the drama, it developed its 
masters and their manners : Spenser and Jonson and 
Donne. As was the case with the drama, the very 
eminence of these masters imposed on later men the 
conventions, the traditions of achievements and man- 
nerisms not instinctively or freely their own. So 
came disintegration and much trace of fastidious ex- 
cess. A sense of limit, too, hung about the later men. 
Each one, we could feel, addressed himself, not, like 
the elder poets, to all who might listen, but only to 



PROSE 159 

such as were disposed to respond. Popularity, no 
doubt, is rarely the lot of any merely lyric utterance. 
To love poetry other than dramatic, indeed, means 
that one has a sensitiveness to beauty akin to what 
we call an ear for music. From its very nature, 
accordingly, poetry other than dramatic could hardly 
fall into the kind of corrupt decadence which overtook 
the drama. So the English lyric followed the course 
of the drama only to the point of a disintegration 
where various kinds of poetry stood each clearly apart 
from the rest — where poetry, in every aspect, was a 
slighter thing, far less broadly national than any poetry 
of Elizabeth's time. To this point, accordingly, the 
course of dramatic poetry and of lyric proved parallel. 
Both bespoke, so far as literature could, a deep disinte- 
gration of national temper — a growing self-conscious- 
ness, now fastidious concerning detail, again quickened 
only by excess of unwholesome stimulant, again still 
contentedly submitting to the numbness of convention. 
Whatever else, the world in which we left all poetry 
alike had outgrown the ardent youthful integrity of 
the world in which we first found it. 

Of chronology, meanwhile, we were perforce care- 
less. And even now it is enough to recall that our 
first survey of literature attempted to discern the 
national temper of England as there revealed, in 1600; 
that our survey of the drama took it from that time 
to the closing of the theatres, in 1642; and that Her- 
rick's "Hesperides," the last work of lyric poetry 



160 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which we have considered, was published in 1648. 
From Queen Elizabeth's time these swift journeys 
took us to the verge of the Commonwealth — from an 
England whence both America and modern England 
have sprung to one from which the main streams of 
our trans-Atlantic national life had already begun to 
diverge. It is on this same period — broadly speaking, 
the first half of the seventeenth century — that we shall 
dwell now, as we consider the tendencies of English 
prose. 

Up to 1600, we have seen, the course of English 
prose had been parallel with that of poetry, but far 
less conspicuous. In general, writers of prose were 
stirred, at first, by no artistic impulse. Broadly speak- 
ing, their purpose was frankly to translate into terms 
which should be understood matter which, untrans- 
lated, would remain obscure. By a little stretch of 
meaning that statement may be made to cover not 
only their avowed translations from foreign tongues 
into a vernacular English subtly ennobled by memories 
of the grand rhythm of Latin, but also such exposi- 
tory narrative as one finds in the chronicles, in the 
records of voyages and adventures, or even in the 
glowing fervor of Foxe's "Book of Martyrs." Of 
all the Elizabethan prose which we recalled, only one 
considerable volume had a really original character; 
this was Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," a work so 
nobly conceived and so gently written as to raise con- 
troversy for once to literary eminence. Elizabethan 



PROSE 161 

prose, in brief, was mostly a thing of daily use, beau- 
tiful and noble in occasional form only because of 
that marvellous Elizabethan integrity which stamped 
every expression of the time with its buoyant spirit. 

This prose, like the verse which surged above it, 
was experimental, too. Englishmen had not yet dis- 
covered what their language could be made to com- 
pass. The poets proved it capable of immortal beau- 
ties. The makers of prose, meanwhile, proved it capa- 
ble of widely various use. Yet, on the whole, they 
hardly attempted to use it for purely literary purpose. 
Or rather, when they did so, it was with such fantastic 
excess of youthful ingenuity as made the novels of 
Lily first popular and soon, when their brief popu- 
larity had faded, inexhaustibly tedious. So far as 
pure literature goes, this elder time has made no per- 
manent prose record. The prose which has survived 
from that period has survived because of the fervid, 
unconscious beauties which, in those full Elizabethan 
days, proved sometimes inseparable from human ex- 
pression, even though the conscious purpose of that 
expression were merely to make something of transi- 
tory usefulness. The moment Lily attempted to use 
prose as a vehicle of fine art, he made only ingeniously 
pretty experiments, the grace of whose affecta- 
tions has long withered away. Of all this elder prose, 
meanwhile, we may assert, even more confidently than 
we asserted of the elder poetry, that it leaves in mem- 
ory an impression of fervid integrity, not of individ- 



162 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ual achievement. Translations, chronicles, records of 
adventure, novels and chap-books, controversies, what- 
ever else, group themselves rather together than apart. 
English prose, to the point where we left it, had never 
yet risen to anything like the eminence which lyric 
poetry had attained in the work of Spenser, or which 
had already crowned dramatic poetry with the superb 
fragments of Marlowe and with the earlier master- 
pieces of Shakspere. 

So, even if the course of prose in the coming time 
— the time which saw the decadence of the drama 
and the disintegration of lyric poetry — had proved 
precisely parallel with these, its decline would have 
been far less salient : a great fall must be from some 
great height. In point of fact, however, though some- 
thing happened to English prose which may be held 
analogous to the fortunes of English poetry, there is 
room for question as to whether the course of prose 
literature was such as can fairly be brought within 
the same formula. Though sound critics have some- 
times called the tendency of seventeenth-century prose 
decadent, there seems equal ground for belief that as 
poetry disintegrated and declined, prose, under the 
same influences tended to develop new power. 

The actual production of English prose between 
1600 and 1650 was more than abundant. On the 
whole, however, the general purpose which underlay 
it remained so little altered from the purpose which 
underlay Elizabethan prose itself that this later prose 



PROSE 163 

is mostly of only historical interest. For its own sake, 
little of it would now be remembered. 

This is surely true of the prose left us by the two 
men who, after Spenser, most deeply stamped their 
impress on English poetry. The style of the jottings 
from Ben Jonson's note-books which were posthu- 
mously published shows just such mingled mastery of 
classical spirit and vernacular English as made his 
dramas bewildering and his lyrics excellent. Here, 
for example, is his well-known comment on Shakspere : 

"I remember, the players have often mentioned it 
as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (what- 
soever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My 
answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thousand. 
Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not 
told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who chose 
that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein 
he most faulted; . . . for I loved the man, and 
do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much 
as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and 
free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, 
and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that 
facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be 
stopped. SuMamminandus erat, as Augustus said of 
Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the 
rule of it had been so too." 

But though Jonson's mastery made him a prose 
writer of positive merit, he used his prose disdain- 
fully. As an artist, as a master, he kept himself, after 



i6 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the fashion of his time, a poet; and it was as a poet 
that he deeply influenced the style of his disciples. 

So Donne, in his graver days, wrote sundry works 
of controversial prose, and left us nearly two hundred 
sermons; but in spite of the fervor which now and 
again glows beneath the massive lines, and reveals the 
same intensity of combined intellect and emotion which 
gives individuality to his poetry, all his prose has 
long since sunk beneath the horizon of time. It is 
memorable, perhaps, in the history of controversy and 
of English religion; it does not linger in literature. 
Witness any characteristic bit of it, such as this: 

"And let him that is subject to these smaller sins 
remember, that as a spider builds always where he 
knows there is the most access and haunt of flies, so 
the devil that hath cast these light cobwebs into thy 
heart, knows that that heart is made of vanities and 
levities; and he that gathers into his treasure what- 
soever thou wastest out of thine, how negligent soever 
thou be, he keeps thy reckoning exactly, and will pro- 
duce against thee at last as many lascivious glances 
as shall make up an adultery, as many covetous wishes 
as shall make up a robbery, as many angry words 
as shall make up a murder ; and thou shalt have dropped 
and crumbled away thy soul, with as much irrecover- 
ableness as if thou hadst poured it out all at once; 
and thy merry sins, thy laughing sins, shall grow to 
be crying sins, even in the ears of God; and though 
thou drown thy soul here, drop after drop, it shall not 



PROSE 165 

burn spark after spark, but have all the fire, and all at 
once, and all eternally, in one entire and intense 
torment." 

Sound preaching, if you like, this is not an example 
of anything like memorable literary art. A similar 
impression will result from a glance at the most con- 
venient collection of seventeenth century English prose 
now generally accessible — at one or two of the volumes 
with which Craik so intelligently supplemented Ward's 
"English Poets." It is not so much that the men 
whom he has selected have been quite forgotten as 
that, on the whole, they are remarkable for other 
things than this prose for which he has momentarily 
recalled them to memory. Or if this prose writing 
be the real reason why they still linger mistily in the 
sunlight, it has proved thus memorable only by 
chance. They wrote, no doubt, in a manner different 
from that of their Elizabethan forerunners; but they 
agreed with them in using the vehicle of prose not 
for literary or artistic purpose, but for purposes of 
instruction, of information, of argument. And if their 
writings have in some degree survived, it is because, 
despite their purposes, they used this growing English 
not only disdainfully, but with a wildly careless power 
of occasional beauty. 

As was the case earlier, there is one clear exception 
to this last generalization. Euphuism, and the like, 
we saw to be the single memorable attempt of the 
elder time to use prose for primarily artistic purpose. 



166 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

It proved popular, it had deep influence, and it with- 
ered like some short-lived flower. In the seventeenth 
century, or at least in the days of King James and 
King Charles, there was no writer of literary prose 
either so salient or so popular as Lily; but there de- 
clared itself one variety of deliberately literary prose, 
practised by a great number of men, which finally had 
a deep and lasting effect on English literature. 

This was the Character- Writing, which persisted, 
in some degree, throughout the century. It has not 
yet been minutely studied. Its origin, at least in its 
fully developed form, is commonly held to be the 
"Characters" of Theophratus, which became accessible 
shortly after 1600; the most familiar and excellent 
example of it in modern literature is the "Caracteres" 
of the French La Bruyere, which did not appear till 
long after this kind of writing had become traditional 
in England, though England never produced an ex- 
ample of it so highly finished as his. The course of 
Character-Writing in England during the first half 
of the seventeenth century may be broadly indicated 
by the names of Hall, Overbury, Earle, George Her- 
bert and Fuller. 

The fact that Hall was earlier and better known 
as a maker of formal and conventional satire throws 
some light on the true nature of English Character- 
Writing. Elizabethan satire, we have seen, was a para- 
doxical attempt to express the experience of a renascent 
world in the terms of a decadent one. Its formal 



PROSE 167 

inspiration, its style, and its temper came chiefly 
from Juvenal and Martial; yet the facts with which 
it dealt were those of Elizabethan England — the 
youthful world from which both America and the 
British Empire of to-day may trace their origin. 
The obvious discordance of its vehicle and its sub- 
stance, accordingly, was perhaps the chief reason why 
it never flourished so strongly as to be conspicuous 
in the perspective of three centuries. Of Elizabethan 
satirists, Hall was among the most noteworthy. Some 
ten years after his satires were published came his 
"Characters of Virtues and Vices," returning to the 
same motive in that vehicle of prose, of which the 
mood is always apparently contemporary. His 
characters are conventional, to be sure; but like some 
more crude Elizabethan ones which preceded them, 
they have a rough aspect of being conventionalized 
from life rather than vitalized from convention. And 
something similar appears in the "Characters" of Sir 
Thomas Overbury and in the "Microcosmography" 
of Earle. George Herbert's "Priest to the Temple" 
carries on the movement, in a deeply characteristic 
setting forth of what, with his earnest Anglicanism, he 
conceived to be the ideal of the Christian Ministry; 
and Fuller's "Holy and Profane State" expresses his 
conception of those types of conduct which really lead 
men heavenward or toward the depths. 

There is development here, of a kind on which we 
well might linger, both for its own sake and for the 



168 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

future which was before it. There can be no question 
that from these conventional characters of seventeenth- 
century observation and abstraction came the distinctly- 
individual characters which have done so much to 
immortalize the essays of the eighteenth century; nor 
yet that the vital characters of eighteenth century 
essays were the direct forerunners of that finally vivid 
characterization which pervades the great period of 
English fiction. Sir Roger de Coverley sprang from 
some abstract country gentleman of the elder charac- 
ter-writing; and from Sir Roger de Coverley sprang 
in turn Parson Adams and Colonel Newcome. But 
we wander afield. By themselves these elder charac- 
ter-writings, the sole memorable phase of literary prose 
during the early seventeenth century, never rose to 
positive eminence. They remain admirably noteworthy 
chiefly because they mark the course which English 
literature took on its way from the unreal conventions 
of Elizabethan satire to the crescent vitality of Addi- 
son's essays. And, as we reminded ourselves when 
we began the considerations now before us, our direct 
concern is with such monuments of literature as have 
actually survived. 

The same half century which produced this minor 
prose, however, produced, as we have seen, dramatic 
poetry, and lyric, too, of lasting excellence. This 
poetry, with the minor prose, should now be tolerably 
distinct in our minds. Thus considered, it should 
serve us a background which should help define our 



PROSE i6g 

impression of five permanent prose works, widely- 
different in character, which enriched English literature 
during these very years : the Authorized Version of 
the Bible, the works of Bacon, Sir Walter Ralegh's 
"History of the World," Burton's "Anatomy of Mel- 
ancholy," and the earlier writings of Sir Thomas 
Browne. On these five we must now dwell, a little 
while, in turn. 

The history of English religion has given the Bible 
of 1611 so eminently sacred a character that long ago 
its very syllables had acquired a peculiar holiness. 
They have had a spiritual efficacy, too, such as might 
well give color to the faith of these simple believers 
who have grown, from time to time, to believe that 
the Englished Word of God resulted from literally 
verbal inspiration. Biblical phrases have accordingly 
passed with language into the subconscious depths of 
our national being until it is less than the truth to 
assert that no one can earnestly think in English to- 
day without, even though all unknowing, an instinctive 
faith that absolute moral right is embodied in phrase 
after phrase of English Scripture. These phrases, fur- 
thermore, have been so uninterruptedly familiar to 
all who speak and think and write our language that, 
quite apart from their sacredness, they have had on 
the utterances of the generations who have known 
them far more deep influence than any other words 
whatsoever. On all this aspect of the Bible we can- 
not touch now. Our inquiry concerns only its place 



i7o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in English literature; and of that place there can be 
no reasonable question. It crowns a period of experi- 
mental translations, mostly direct and made by indi- 
vidual men, with a work of slowly developed, com- 
posite translation which may fairly be termed the 
greatest translation in the world. 

Translation, we have seen already, is a term which 
may be stretched to include almost all the achievements 
of Elizabethan literature. The poets and the drama- 
tists, as well as the men who avowedly rendered into 
English works from foreign tongues, were chiefly con- 
cerned with phrasing in new ways thoughts and emo- 
tions, alive with interest and beauty, which they had 
discovered in a form less satisfactory than that in 
which they left them. Originality, invention in the 
modern sense, an Elizabethan never dreamed of. He 
took what material he found at hand, and dealt 
with it as he pleased, eager chiefly to make it, in 
new guise, more intelligible, more alluring, more 
effective. In general, of course, the poets and the 
dramatists and the translators, from classical languages 
or from modern, worked either each by himself or in 
careless collaboration. In general, all rendered the 
material with which they dealt into the terms of the 
moment. So, when the moment passed, those terms 
became magnificently pristine — no longer, what they 
had been, stirring examples of the language actually 
used by living men. 

The diuturnity of English Scripture is partly, no 



7 



PROSE 171 

doubt, a matter of its reverend holiness in the eyes of 
the generations ; partly, too, a matter of more cold, dog- 
matic teaching; but, in no small degree, it is due to the 
nature of the terms in which that masterpiece of trans- 
lation was finally phrased. From the earliest times 
when Sacred Writ was first rendered into English, 
the men who attempted the task were familiar with 
Scripture chiefly, if not only, in its Latin form; and 
the Latinized Scripture of the Catholic Church, 
whatever its merits as a translation from Hebrew and 
Greek, possesses superb liturgical rhythm. Open it 
anywhere, read aloud a few verses, and you will feel 
for yourselves that marvellous surge and cadence of 
sound which has echoed, since the days of the Fathers, 
through the domes and arches of Christian sanctuaries. 
Something of this cosmic music could not but haunt 
the memories of those who strove to phrase its burden 
in terms which should once more be intelligible, as 
well as stirring, to simple listeners. This rhythm 
alone would have raised English Scripture to a gran- 
deur above the level of this world, whose daily phrase 
falls into the rhythm not of the ages, but of transitory 
time. 

Again, the power of our Scriptural language is 
not only a question of its noble rhythm; it is due 
almost as much to the purpose which possessed all 
the generations of translators, that the Word of God 
should be accessible to all who would hearken. Thus, 
half unwittingly, the English translators, generation 



172 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

after generation, strove to render the divine accents 
of the Church into words which should instantly touch 
the heads and the hearts of English-speaking humanity. 

Among the elder translators animated by this pur- 
pose, one is beginning to seem pre-eminent. In the 
personality of Tyndale, as the records of his life 
reveal him, there was something which marked him, 
beyond other men, as the greatest master of this 
noble double purpose. In his own avowed translations 
one feels, again and again, not only the rhythm of 
the centuries, not only the simple language of Eng- 
lish mankind, but the glow, too, of such personal 
fervor as inspires the more conscious utterances of 
great individual poets. If one might dare general- 
ize, one might venture to guess that, so far as the 
secret of English Scripture can be analyzed, it may 
be traced to these three sources: the simple funda- 
mental dialect which all who speak our language 
can understand; the glorious liturgical rhythm of the 
Latin Church, and the individual fervor of William 
Tyndale. 

Tyndale they burned for a heretic in King Henry's 
time, when Wyatt and Surrey were beginning to prune 
into lyric grace the wild beauties of elder English. 
And then came the days of King Edward VI., and 
of Queen Mary, and the great reign of Elizabeth. 
These very names are enough to remind us of the 
religious turmoil and strife, of the clashing creeds and 
theologies, saintlinesses and priestcrafts, through which 



PROSE 173 

England struggled from the past toward the future. 
Amid these passionate controversies, various versions 
of English Scripture were made, some tending con- 
sciously toward that Calvinism which by and by was 
to be for a little while fleetingly triumphant, one 
deliberately striving to express in English the tradi- 
tional orthodoxy of Rome. Finally, at a moment when 
English scholarship was more sound than ever before, 
and when English churchmanship was for a little while 
more peaceful, a great body of scholarly Englishmen 
— their names now mostly forgotten — sat them down 
and made the critical revision of the English Bible 
which has been accepted by all Protestant England 
since it finally appeared in 161 1. 

This very date helps us fix its place in our study. 
The year 161 1, we may recall, was the year before 
Webster published his preface to the "White Devil," 
which confessed how the drama was submitting 
to the bonds of fresh tradition. Shakspere was 
still at work; Jonson, Dekker, Hey wood, Middleton, 
and Beaumont and Fletcher were at the height of 
their power. The Spenserian poets — Giles Fletcher 
and Browne — were in the midst of their work; Chap- 
man had just completed his translation of the "Iliad" ; 
the lyric influence of Jonson and of Donne was 
fresh in the air. Ralegh, in the Tower, had almost 
finished the colossal fragment of his great History; 
and Bacon was preparing to publish that second 
edition of his essays which added so much to the 



174 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

first that we may almost consider it as the original. 
Queen Elizabeth was dead, but the spirit in English 
literature which we call Elizabethan was at its height. 
Virginia was just founded; New England was just 
about to be. These were the surroundings of the men 
who gave to the English Bible the form which has been 
found final. Their language had been mastered, and 
shown to be a vehicle of widely various beauty. 
In poetry, dramatic and lyric alike, it had proceeded 
so far that the bonds of new tradition — the conscious- 
ness of what the masters had achieved — were begin- 
ning to stiffen about it. But prose was still free to 
surge on, with such momentary unconsciousness of 
all but its purpose as succeeds an age of experiment 
and comes before an age where the result of free ex- 
periment has imposed new conventions. 

The Bible, no doubt, even more than the deliberate 
stanzas of Spenser, was writ in no language. As we 
possess it, we find it a revision, made with wonderfully 
sensitive care for rhythm, of the elder versions which 
had been growing toward this culmination almost 
from the days of Wickliffe. What marks it as of its 
own time is the utterly natural quality of its immor- 
tal beauty. In its own way, this composite outgrowth 
of earnest devout purpose, made at last by so many 
collaborating hands that one cannot even guess from 
whom came any single touch of final loving care for 
word or rhythm, may be held, in mere literature, the 
ultimate achievement of English prose. Though it 



PROSE 175 

be quite in the dialect of no instant ever known to 
men, it is full of that spirit which we have so often 
tried to define as Elizabethan. It is the one final 
expression, in our prose, of such mastery as results 
from generations of experiment and precedes genera- 
tions of newly deadening tradition. 

If you would feel this quality, compare any passage 
from the Authorized New Testament with the Revised 
Version of it made a few years ago. In our New Eng- 
land, still faintly stirred by the saintly heresies of Chan- 
ning, modern divines are apt to prefer these more 
accurate words of Victorian scholarship. They are 
often more consonant with the Higher Criticism than 
the Authorized Version appears to be; and so, per- 
haps, they come a shade nearer what the temper of 
this passing day fancies to be truth. But as one begins 
to recognize the loss of beauty which jars on the ear 
with every fresh discord of that modern strain for 
accuracy, there comes a crescent sense that, though 
the revisers sought earnestly for truth, they have 
strayed from the deeper truth which makes the words 
and the rhythm of the elder Scripture seem almost 
literally divine. 

It was during the year after the Authorized Ver- 
sion was published — during the year 1612, in which 
Webster set forth his "White Devil" and in which 
Shakspere probably ceased writing for the stage — 
that the second edition of Bacon's essays appeared. 
The first, published in 1597, had contained only ten 



176 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

essays; this swelled the number to thirty-eight. It 
was not until 1625 that the final edition was published, 
adding twenty more, and reducing the earlier ones to 
the form in which we commonly read them. Had 
they never proceeded beyond the state which they had 
reached in 161 2, however, they would still have re- 
mained Bacon's principal contribution to English lit- 
erature. 

Without a line of them, no doubt, his name would 
have been great. His professional career as a lawyer 
and a statesman was enough to assure him lasting 
eminence. He had infirmities, of course, which tra- 
dition has exaggerated; and the close of his public 
life was tragically disgraceful. But you have only to 
read the pages in which Gardiner, the most faithful 
and scholarly of English historians, has recorded 
Bacon's legal and political acts and utterances, to feel 
that these alone would have justified his claim to 
the admiration of posterity. If Bacon had lived com- 
pletely apart from the world, meanwhile, his writings 
as a philosopher — as one who in youth took all knowl- 
edge to be his province, and strove unceasingly to 
reduce it to lawful order — would, by themselves, have 
won him impregnable fame. He did not, as he had 
hoped to do, lead the way finally from the confusion 
of the past to what he believed might be the certainties 
of the future, but he pointed the way in which those 
who were afterward to lead must set their faces. Neg- 
lecting all this, we might find, in a less familiar 



PROSE 177 

piece of his writing, good reason for holding him 
a lasting master, even though he had left no other 
trace; for his brief "History of King Henry VII.," 
with the making of which he diverted the first months 
of his disgrace, is an almost classical model, from 
amid an age of chronicles and legends and contro- 
versial mendacities, of what calmly critical history 
ought finally to be. And yet, if this, too, with his 
public life and his philosophical leadership, had never 
been, or had been lost in the recesses of some unre- 
corded past, the essays — even in the form which they 
had assumed by 161 2 — would have secured his mem- 
ory as a man of letters. Whatever else, they remain 
what they were from the moment when they first saw 
the light — the masterpieces of English aphorism. 

Throughout Elizabethan literature, in all the en- 
thusiastic spontaneity of its experimental outburst, 
aphorism had flourished. Though the elder brother- 
hood of our poets and writers seem, as we saw at 
first, chiefly makers of phrase, eagerly playing with 
their newly mastered language, this very play involved 
something more than words to play with. The saws 
of Polonius awakened to humorous human vitality 
a kind of common-sense with which Lily had packed 
line after line of his ephemeral "Euphues." The dif- 
ference between this literary aphorism and such native 
proverbial wisdom as springs, with folk-lore, from the 
depths of humanity, lies mostly in the consciousness 
of its ingenuity. A phrase-maker, knowingly at work, 



178 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

feels moved to make wise phrases ; and if he be shrewd 
and live in times when the world about him is alive 
with some common impulse, he may swiftly make 
wise phrases which strike root deep. 

With Bacon, in the Essays, the phrase-making im- 
pulse of the earlier days had passed into a new phase. 
As one turns his pages, one feels in them still the 
full Elizabethan freshness of play with language; but 
one feels beneath this play a deeper wisdom than any- 
where before. He cares for phrase, deeply and care- 
fully; he gives his phrases a turn, an epigrammatic 
decision, inimitably his own, too; nor do you feel him 
always so deeply serious that he would stoutly hold 
this utterance or that impregnable, so long as the 
turn of it proved impregnably happy. But, for all 
this, he writes as one who cares more for the sub- 
stance of his phrases than for their felicitous incisive- 
ness. This man has actually lived, you feel, and has 
observed life, with a keenness which has really pene- 
trated the surface; he is ready at last to generalize 
with superb assurance; able, too, partly because of his 
power, and partly because of the spirit which animates 
his time, to generalize so wisely that, if we knew less 
about him and were a little more given than we are 
to faith in miracles, we might fall to wondering 
whether such utterances came from a being merely 
human. Not that they are divine; the wisdom of 
them is the wisdom of this world; but they are not 
diabolical, either — they do not whisper such mocking 



PROSE 179 

half truths as should lure believers into sloughs of false- 
hood. Rather they might seem, in fancy, the playful 
recreations of some superhuman enchanter — of Pros- 
pero, when his robes were laid aside, or of that 
mediaeval Virgil to whose cunning, for so long a 
while, wondering ignorance was apt to credit the 
crumbling relics of Roman engineering. 

Such achievement bespeaks, as we have just ob- 
served, a time spirit, from which the impulse of the 
individual master can be quickened. These essays 
were making while Shakspere and his later fellows 
were at the height of their power — when England, 
as revealed in literature, was glowing with the final 
fulness of its Elizabethan life. And Bacon, when that 
second edition of them appeared, was fifty years old. 
When, in an eagerly vital age, conscious of the in- 
toxication of crescent existence, a human being, native- 
ly shrewd, is grown to the fulness of his maturity, 
his power of generalizing concerning the facts of ex- 
perience, as they reveal themselves to a single genera- 
tion or even on the surface of the generations, seems 
inexhaustible. 

But all this is not absolute truth, nor yet scientific 
fact. It is only the final utterance of shrewd national 
empiricism. To reduce to subjection so wide a prov- 
ince as all knowledge, your general must lay his plans 
with almost divine foresight; and then, the plans laid, 
he must send ahead his armies of obedient scouts and 
engineers, to prepare the ways for certain conquest. 



180 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

It was not Gordon, but Kitchener, who recovered the 
Nile. And the work of Bacon's which, apart from 
his statesmanship, he would have held most serious, 
was inevitably abortive. We have not time to enter 
into any detail of his philosophy. We can only re- 
mind ourselves that he perceived, with all the shrewd 
certainty which pervades his essays, the cardinal errors 
of the old scholastic learning; that he pointed out, 
with the same certainty, how sound and permanent 
knowledge must rest upon an impregnable basis of 
ascertained fact; and that he never quite understood 
how such a basis could be discovered, or secured, 
only by the patient labors of more generations than 
have yet elasped since he caught his death-chill stuff- 
ing a fowl with snow. So, even though he pointed 
the way in which the future has travelled and shall 
travel, the course on which he so boldly started to 
lead brought him soon to regions shrouded in fresh 
mists — differing from the mists from which he had 
emerged only as the mists of morning differ from 
those which thicken toward sunset. 

The "Novum Organum" — the beginning of his 
magnificent, unfinished work of cosmic philosophy — 
was published in 1620. Its title-page, which I had 
not recalled to mind until I turned again to it, as I 
was writing this passage, may perhaps be the image 
from which there has grown in my fancy that figure 
with which we have played more than once — of the Pil- 
lars of Hercules, toward which all Elizabethan England 



PROSE 181 

buoyantly voyaged together, in search of the wealthy 
mysteries of the limitless seas beyond. For, after the 
quaintly symbolic fashion of its time, this title-page 
bears on either side two round monolithic columns, 
doubtless representing those same Pillars of Hercules, 
which limited the world of antiquity. Between them, 
on the title-page, surges an extremely tempestuous 
sea, from which emerge two or three monstrous, big- 
eyed, fishy heads. Neither waves nor monsters affect 
the stability of a gallant ship, prudent enough to have 
housed all but her lower sails. Bellying with the 
full northeast wind, these are speeding her through 
the momentary narrows of the straits which connect 
the seas of the past with the oceans of the future. 
A desperately grinning whale is scurrying away from 
across her bows. And just beneath, on a flatly straight- 
ened scroll, are the words, "Multi pertransibunt, et 
augebitur scientia." It is from the book of Daniel : 
"Many shall run to and fro," the Authorized Version 
has it, "and knowledge shall be increased." The 
image and the motto have proved more true than 
Bacon knew. He led the way to the straits of knowl- 
edge; and many have since passed to and fro; but of 
the number he was hardly one. "Pertransibunt" 
reads the motto, not "pertransibimus" ; yet the most 
ardent professors of modern science and certain knowl- 
edge, still in the heydey of their tireless exploration, 
are the first to acknowledge the brave leadership of 
Bacon, whose shrewd wisdom has outlasted his inev- 
itable error. 



182 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

After all, it is Bacon's aphorism which has won 
him in literature his most lasting eminence. That 
Elizabethan world of his had an amazing individual 
and national integrity. The spirit of it was common 
to all who breathed its air; nor yet had life begun 
so to specialize itself, to disintegrate, that a great man 
need be great only in a single kind of greatness. This 
chief master of our aphoristic wisdom, this admirable 
inventor of inimitably positive and assertive English 
style, was greater still, in his own time, as a lawyer 
and a statesman and a philosopher. There are few 
more singular evidences of how this world of ours 
at once changes and remains unchanging than in the 
fancies which have lately begun to twine themselves 
about his memory. Our world has now travelled so 
far from his pristine and spacious Elizabethan time 
that none but students of it can quite know how nor- 
mally Elizabethan was its versatile integrity. Mar- 
velling, accordingly, at all that Bacon was, unscholarly 
moderns — moderns, it were better to say, unversed in 
the history of national temper as revealed in literature — 
have been unwilling to believe that any other man 
of his time could have approached his range and 
power. So, just as mediaeval legend, recognizing in 
Virgil the master of Latin poetry, attributed to that 
same Virgil the mechanical marvels achieved by im- 
perial Rome, so a new modern legend is seeking to 
attribute to Bacon — statesman, lawyer, philosopher, 
and master of aphorism — those Shaksperian master- 



PROSE 183 

pieces of the drama which anyone who really knows 
Elizabethan England must instinctively feel to pos- 
sess, in common with Bacon's works, only the spirit 
which made all men of the time Elizabethan. 



VII 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROSE 

RALEGH, BURTON AND BROWNE 

Bacon, we have seen, was Elizabethan, like Shak- 
spere ; but neither seems quite the most typical Eliza- 
bethan of all. In any time there is apt to appear some 
one figure which proves, in the perspective of history, 
to embody its spirit beyond all the rest. And among 
Elizabethan Englishmen the most comprehensively 
characteristic now seems to have been Sir Walter 
Ralegh. 

A country gentleman by birth, at heart the boldest 
of adventurers, he had experienced, by the accession 
of King James, almost every phase of life known 
to the period. He had been a soldier, a sailor, 
an explorer, a colonizer ; he had been deeply concerned 
in court intrigues, and in all manner of politics; as a 
royal favorite he had achieved an enormous degree 
of personal fortune and influence; he had had his 
multitudes of followers and of enemies; and he was 
a poet, meanwhile, who could find time, when he was 
planning plantations in Ireland, to listen to the manu- 
script of the "Faerie Queene," and to reward Spenser 
by reading to him in turn passages from some epic 

184 



PROSE 185 

of his own which has not survived. Whatever region 
of Elizabethan life you explore, you are sure to find 
there — loved or hated, as the case may be — the figure 
or the shadow of Ralegh. Throughout this various, 
adventurous life of his, a marvellous romantic proto- 
type of what nowadays we call self-made success, he 
seems all the while to have remained true to one 
patriotic conviction : namely, that the future prosperity 
of England depended on the reduction of the world- 
power of Spain, then at the height from which it has 
crumbled through three full centuries. So far as rela- 
tions with Spain went, accordingly, Ralegh was always 
a consistent man of war. Now King James was at 
heart a man of peace. In this fact lies a good part 
of the secret of Ralegh's fall so soon after King 
James's accession. Within a year or so they com- 
mitted him to the Tower; and there he remained for 
twelve years. 

Such imprisonment, at that time, was a mere de- 
tention of the person. Ralegh was free to see his 
friends and to busy himself with what studies and 
the like he chose. It is to these years, accordingly, 
— to the accident that the most versatile of Elizabethan 
adventurers was so long kept from public activity — that 
we owe his great, unfinished "History of the World." 
This gives him permanent place in English literature. 
With every aid which the best historical learning of 
his time could afford, he devoted himself chiefly to 
composing a universal history. 



186 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The purpose and the plan of this work are not only 
noble, but almost modern in their calm, masterful in- 
telligence. History, Ralegh conceived, is the record 
of God's purposes, as these are wrought out in the 
conduct and the fate of men. If we study history, 
accordingly, with reverent care, it will teach us, with 
the knowledge of God's purposes, how we ought to con- 
duct ourselves, and incidentally how we shall most 
surely prosper. His own words are worth recalling: 

"Such is the multiplying and extensive virtue of 
dead earth, and of that breath-giving life which God 
hath cast upon slime and dust; as that among those 
that were, of whom we read and hear, and among 
those that are, whom we see and converse with, every 
one has received a several picture of face, and every 
one a diverse picture of mind ; every one a form apart, 
every one a fancy and cogitation differing : there being 
nothing wherein nature so much triumpheth, as in 
dissimilitude. . . . And though it hath pleased 
God to reserve the art of reading men's thoughts to 
himself; yet, as the fruit tells the name of the tree, 
so do the outward works of men (so far as their 
cogitations are acted) give us whereof to guess at 
the rest." — And history is the record of these out- 
ward works of man, themselves tokens of the inner 
purposes of God. — "It hath triumphed over time, 
which, besides it, nothing but eternity hath triumphed 
over. . . . By it we live in the very time when 
{the world) was created; we behold how it was gov- 



PROSE 187 

erned ; how it was covered with waters and again 
re-peopled; how kings and kingdoms have flourished 
and fallen; and for what virtue and piety God made 
prosperous, and for what sin and deformity he made 
wretched, both the one and the other. And it is not 
the least debt which we owe unto history, that it 
hath made us acquainted with our dead ancestors; 
and, out of the depth and darkness of the earth, 
delivered us their memory and fame. In a word, 
we may gather out of history a policy no less wise 
than eternal ; by the comparison and application of 
other men's fore-passed miseries with our own like 
errors and ill-deservings." 

The terms of Ralegh's time were different from 
those we commonly use to-day. It needs no great 
effort of mind, however, to translate this grave and 
noble statement of his purpose as a historian into 
something which may well be called the highest ideal 
of philosophic history. Nowadays we are apt to speak 
and to think of natural law without reference to the 
infinite sanction behind it; to be content with assur- 
ance of how the stars move in their courses without 
asking why. But as surely as Ralegh discerned in 
history the record of God's dealings with men, so we 
to-day regard history as the record of how natural law 
reveals its working throughout human society. In 
history, as well as in all science else, the use of facts 
is that they can finally enable us to generalize with 
wisdom, and thus to know a little and a little more. 



188 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

For all the archaism of the terms in which Ralegh 
set forth his purpose, it accordingly seems evident that 
his purpose was truly the abiding purpose of philoso- 
phic history. To the execution of this purpose he 
brought an astonishing equipment. He was not, to be 
sure, deeply trained in the arts of scholarly investiga- 
tion, but he had at his disposal the assistance of the best 
scholarship of his day. His own life, meanwhile, had 
involved a range of experience, public and private, in- 
tellectual and emotional, as wide as any human being's 
can be. This experience, too, he had mastered, in true 
Elizabethan spirit. No doubt, the career of Ralegh 
had had its errors, even its rascalities. But he lived 
before men had begun to dream — as so many do nowa- 
days — that the marriage of principles and conduct in 
this world can be complete and binding. So, for all his 
personal shortcomings, he could honestly face his sub- 
ject with that sustained loftiness of mood and purpose 
which is one of the secrets of Elizabethan grandeur. 
With such temper, he brought to bear on the records 
of the past a critical common-sense, developed to a 
rare degree by his wonderfully extensive knowledge 
of actual life. His purpose, his temper, and his merely 
personal equipment were those of ideal historian. 

And yet his great work, though for many years it 
had deep influence on serious men, has long since 
become no more than a noble example of seventeenth 
century style. The reason for this we can instantly 
see. Glance at his table of contents, to go no further : 



PROSE 189 

you will find him devoting a good part of a chapter 
to a discussion of whether the tree of knowledge was 
— or was not — Hens India; a little later comes a long 
consideration of the precise capacity of Noah's Ark, 
and a far longer one of just where that colossal craft 
probably grounded. Elizabethan learning was exten- 
sive, industrious, widely curious ; but it was no more 
able than that of modern children to distinguish be- 
tween record and legend. It could make admirable 
chronicles; and a little later, in Bacon's wonderful 
"Henry VII.," it proved itself capable of admirable 
condensation of recent fact, traditional and docu- 
mentary. But there can be no more final comment 
on the futulity of Ralegh's purpose in his own day than 
the opinion of many serious modern students who hold 
such work as Bacon's to be even still a model of all 
that a wise historian — despite the riches of accessible 
record to-day — should dare attempt. Even still, many 
believe, we are not learned enough to philosophize, 
except perhaps as a pleasantly playful waste of time. 
More clearly, by far, than the mists in which Bacon's 
philosophy tended to lose its details, the ultimate fail- 
ure of Ralegh's history defines at once the aspiration 
and the limits of Elizabethan learning. 

Ralegh's style, the while, had a grandeur and a 
beauty which make his pages positively admirable. A 
hasty comparison of it with Bacon's will define them 
both. Of Henry VII., Bacon writes, in a sentence 
which one instinctively feels to be deeply character- 



i 9 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

istic, this incisively characteristic fact : "He was utter- 
ly unwilling (howsoever he gave out) to enter into 
a war with France. A fame of war he liked well, 
but not an achievement ; for the one he thought would 
make him richer, and the other poorer." Place beside 
this the famous passage with which Ralegh's history 
ends: "It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly 
make man to know himself. He tells the proud and 
insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them 
at the instant, makes them cry, complain, and repent, 
yea, even to hate their forepast happiness. He takes 
account of the rich, and proves him a beggar, a naked 
beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the 
gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before 
the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see 
therein their deformity and rottenness, and they ac- 
knowledge it. 

"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none 
could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath 
dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath 
flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and 
despised ; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched 
greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, 
and covered it all over with these two narrow words, 
Hie jacet!" 

Ralegh and Bacon were both Elizabethans, but Ral- 
egh's writings — as truly things of their own present 
as were Bacon's — link him to the past and Bacon's 
to the future. The quality of Bacon's style — Eliza- 



PROSE 191 

bethan, yet all his own — is that of a marvellous vehicle 
of precisely apprehended meaning; that of Ralegh's — 
Elizabethan, too, and yet as deeply, though rather less 
saliently, individual — bespeaks a nature which could 
not express itself without a rhythmic ebb and flow 
which should suffuse meaning with the throbbing 
strength of half-repressed imaginative fervor. Liter- 
ally contemporary, both of them, with the Authorized 
Version of the Bible, they add a new feature to our 
impression of the period which brought them forth. 
It was the period, we remember, when the drama was 
swiftly declining into conventions, and when lyric 
poetry was beginning to disintegrate under the influ- 
ences emanating from newly acknowledged masters. 
English poetry, in brief, had passed the limit of its 
highest achievement. At this very time, English prose 
was gaining in range, in power, in variety; but, ex- 
cept in the consecrated words and rhythms of the 
Bible, which, even in its own day, was writ in no 
language ever used for the daily intercourse of men, 
English prose had not yet reached the momentary 
stability of so fixed a manner as should inevitably 
impose itself on the writings to come. Here was 
left more than a trace of the elder freedom, though 
hardly of the elder unconsciousness. Here, at least, 
was something which might still grow, might still 
develop indefinitely before the cramping grasp of con- 
vention should stiffen about it. 

Thus for an instant touching on the lack of restrain- 



i92 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ing formal consciousness, we may be tempted to for- 
get the substance of this crescent literature. In the 
Bible it had achieved the masterpiece of all translation ; 
in the aphorisms of Bacon it had achieved master- 
pieces of proverbial wisdom. The spirit of the time 
was friendly to both. When Bacon attempted to sub- 
ject all knowledge to his rule, on the other hand, and 
when Ralegh strove to make all history reveal the 
secret of its laws, both failed ; and both failed because 
each had attempted to make the legendary and un- 
critical learning of his time serve a purpose for which 
learning is hardly ripe even to-day. In Bacon's phi- 
losophy, accordingly, and in Ralegh's history, one may 
feel, with all one's admiration, a certain vague dissatis- 
faction such as springs from a sense that men are striv- 
ing to do something which cannot be properly done 
without other material and equipment than they possess. 
Here are masters, one feels, yet no masterpiece. 

In this aspect, Ralegh and Bacon alike throw light 
on the reason why, a very little later, a man so deeply 
their inferior as was Robert Burton should have been 
able to produce a book which, to any man of letters, 
is on the whole so much more satisfactory, even though 
so much less admirable, than theirs. Like Bacon and 
Ralegh, Burton was a man of his time; unlike them, 
he had no such restless ambition, such versatile im- 
pulse of activity, as should urge him, even in imag- 
ination, beyond it. A quiet, eccentric, somewhat 
whimsical scholar, he meddled in no public affairs, 



PROSE 193 

but read, with a queer mixture of childish curiosity 
and mature persistence, in the endless folios, now long 
buried beneath the dust of libraries, which included 
the learning of his time. To him a book was a book, 
an author an author, a statement a statement, an opin- 
ion an opinion. There are few more artless self- 
revelations in literature than the passage from his 
"Digression of Air," where, touching on the solar 
system, he mentions, as of equal authority, the names 
of Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Patricius, Kepler, Cal- 
cagninus, Rotman, Galileo, Lansbergius, Tycho, Ptole- 
maeus, and Dr. Gilbert. Whatever chanced to interest 
him, he noted or remembered; as to criticising its 
value, in any modern sense of the term criticism, the 
notion never occurred to him. 

Such a man might easily have been another Dry-as- 
dust, adding to libraries only one more such drowsy 
folio as he had found in them. It is Burton's special 
grace that he has kept accessible, to all who love read- 
ing for its own sake, an inexhaustible treasury of 
such oddities as without him they would have been 
compelled laboriously to collect for themselves. In 
every sense of the word, Burton was humorous. 
Gravely accepting scholastic physiology, he treated 
melancholy as a literal humor, which if it got the 
better of the others in a man would work mischief. 
Aware of the tendency, inevitably growing in his 
time, toward no too buoyant a view of life, he set 
to work on an elaborate, scholastic attempt to ana- 



i 9 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

lyze this vexatiously dominant humor, and to ascertain 
its causes, its nature, its varieties, and the best means 
of counteracting it. At first sight, his tables of con- 
tents look like marvels of dry logical precision. A 
stranger to the language in which he wrote might 
intelligently assume his work to be a miracle of sys- 
tem. This pretence to scientific method gives us a 
glimpse of his humor in the modern sense ; for in truth 
there was never a more whimsical, unexpected hodge- 
podge than that same "Anatomy of Melancholy." 
What keeps it so lastingly alive is the actual humor of 
its details. Burton does not make you laugh ; his quaint 
turns of thought and phrase, however, quietly fantastic, 
dryly good-natured, constantly unexpected, make him 
one of the few garrulous writers who never bore you. 
How seriously he meant himself to be taken is a 
question hard to answer. The eyes which look at 
you from his prim, dimpled portrait at Brasenose 
College smile across the centuries an assurance that 
if you will let him quietly amuse you with his whim- 
sically learned babble, you need never quarrel with him 
about graver things. 

There were actualities in that world of his, speeding 
as it was from the buoyant integrity of Elizabethan 
England to be clashing tragedy of the Civil Wars, 
on the eve of which, they say, he "sent up his soul 
to heaven through a noose about his neck" — humorous 
to the end, in his determination that some astrologic 
prediction concerning his length of days should not 



PROSE 195 

be falsified. But you might play with the pages of 
his "Anatomy of Melancholy" till doomsday before 
you should gather from them any suspicion of the 
troubles thickening in the air about them. There 
is no book anywhere which bespeaks more personal 
isolation — not, to be sure, an ascetic solitude, but a 
whimsical learned retirement, where you may come 
whenever you will and listen to queerly pedantic 
chat; and whence you may go when you like, with 
a puzzled consciousness of his inscrutable smile, as he 
watches your departing shoulders. You do not know 
quite what it all means ; you have no reason to believe 
that he knows any better than you. There is a touch, 
indeed, of true, lasting melancholy about it all — no 
hearty laughter, nor buoyant enthusiasm. Yet the 
air is never darkened by ill-humor, either. In this 
odd creature's learned solitude, varied and enlivened 
by his genius for collecting and recollecting all manner 
of curious fact and fancy, there is an inexhaustible 
charm. 

His style, too, garrulous and amorphous though you 
so often found it, and saturated throughout with a 
consciousness of the scholastic Latin in which he was 
incessantly reading and thinking, proves a singularly 
true vehicle of his temper. With all its pedantries and 
whimsicalities, it has the admirable merit of making 
you feel just as the writer would have you. There 
is something still contagious in the unpremeditated 
good-humor of its quaintness. Burton's "Anatomy 



i 9 6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of Melancholy," substance and form alike, is really 
a masterpiece. It does its work finally. It remains, 
what it was from the beginning, a certain source of 
delight to all who shall ever love the curiosities of 
literature. 

There have been plenty of literary oddities since his 
time — of curiosities, deliberately collected and quaintly 
phrased. That variety of literature is happily inex- 
tinguishable. But among all the rest Burton stands, 
as he stood from the very first, isolated, distinctly 
alone. And when one asks from what this im- 
pression of his excellent individuality arises, the 
answer is not far to seek. Literary oddity — either 
in substance or in style, or in both — commonly in- 
volves such effort as makes you insensibly suspect 
that it is in some degree a matter of affectation, or at 
least of intentional divergence from any generally ac- 
knowledged standard. With Burton, you have no 
such sense. Here, you feel, is a very learned man, 
who lived in days when learning was a matter of 
mere acquisition. The world had not yet begun to 
digest its mental food — to select that which should 
prove nutritive, to discard that which should prove 
useless. After all, in those days, a scholar showed 
deep good sense in trusting instinct — in remembering 
what amused him, in forgetting or ignoring what 
failed to do so. When Bacon or Ralegh tried to use 
such learning as they could command, in earnest, phil- 
osophic temper, they only revealed its poverty; when 



PROSE 197 

Burton was content, after the pedantic fashion of his 
time, merely to collect it in heaps where you can 
always discover trinkets- and fragments which you 
would never expect to find just there, he did with 
it the only thing which in his day could be excellently 
done. So, as you read him, you fall unwittingly into 
a mood which you shall hardly find elsewhere. And 
when you try to give yourself acount of this mood, 
in modern terms, you will be at pains to phrase it more 
definitely than when you are content to admit it the 
normal mood of learning in Burton's time. 

This primitive learning was an inexhaustible mine 
of quaint curiosities. These you could range like the 
specimens in some old-fashioned cabinet, or some 
child's, where you may find, side by side, a nautilus 
shell, a Buddhist prayer-wheel, an autograph of John 
Wilkes, a New England hornbook, and a war-club 
from the South Seas. It had little relation to actual- 
ity; it did not trouble itself to distinguish between 
Copernicus and Dr. Dee; but, when you chose to 
accept it for no more than it was, you might always 
find it indefinitely stimulating to solitary fancy, al- 
most to imagination. Nowadays, if you try thus to 
set forth learning, your play is poisoned with the 
knowledge that such busy fruitlessness is nothing 
but play; what makes Burton's "Anatomy" a master- 
piece is that it plays with learning after the manner 
of childhood, not quite aware and not caring at all 
whether this be really play or solemn earnest. 



198 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Between Burton and the other master of our sev- 
enteenth-century prose on whom we agreed to touch, 
there are obvious points of likeness. Sir Thomas 
Browne — for to Browne's name has long clung the 
knighthood conferred on him by King Charles II. — 
had already published, before 1648, the two works 
on which his place in literature chiefly rests — "Religio 
Medici" and his treatise on "Vulgar Errors." In his 
literary mood these show him to have resembled 
Burton variously: his temper was essentially solitary, 
for one thing; he was widely and curiously learned, 
too; and he was instinctively fond of the oddities 
and the curiosities which his learning brought to his 
knowledge. On the other hand, Browne was a pro- 
fessional physician, a trained observer of Nature; and 
by temperament he was addicted if not to philosophy 
at least to philosophizing. So he was far from con- 
tent to bring together in fantastic heaps the cullings 
of his learning. Whatever he discussed, he discussed 
in speculative mood. This mood, too, was one of 
such quietly sustained imaginative fervor that he 
could not rest content with the language of life to 
convey its meaning to his readers. Wherever you 
open his pages, accordingly, you will soon be aware 
of a deliberate choice of swelling words, of a cun- 
ningly contrived rhythmic surge and cadence of 
sound, which has led many critics, even among those 
who delight in his beauties, to condemn his conscious 
rhetoric as decadent. 



PROSE 199 

Decadent in influence so palpably artificial a style 
may well be. Take the first sentence which chances 
to meet my eye in the address prefixed to his "Vul- 
gar Errors" : "We hope it will not be unconsidered, 
that we find no open tract or conscious manuduc- 
tion in this labyrinth, but are ofttimes fain to wander 
in the America and untravelled parts of truth." The 
deliberate manner of this, with its conscious latinism 
of phrase, its thoughtful elaboration of metaphor, 
its intentionally delicate balance, might easily lead 
imitators to mannerism. What imitators could not 
imitate is at once the exquisite felicity of the final fig- 
ure, and the indefinable touch which excites your in- 
stinctive certainty that Browne's emotional purpose 
could be expressed only by this magniloquent cadence. 
How else should the simplicity of his lovely phrase 
appear in all its beauty, than by contrast with the big 
words just before it, and by the rhythm which brings 
all the emphasis to itself? It was the saving grace, 
we saw, of Burton's garrulous pedantry, that nothing 
else could faithfully set forth his meaning; just such 
saving grace makes excellent the deliberate rhetoric of 
Browne. 

With him we are come to a later time. The church- 
men and scholars who produced the Authorized Ver- 
sion of the Bible had all grown to their maturity in 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth; so had Ralegh; so had 
Bacon; so had Burton. But Browne was not born 
until after Elizabeth was in her grave; and before his 



2oo THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

"Religio Medici" was published, thirty-one years after 
the Authorized Version saw the light, Ralegh and 
Bacon and Burton were dead. The theatres were 
closed that same year and the Civil Wars broke out. 
Browne's solitude, the scholarly and philosophic isola- 
tion of his literary mood, accordingly stands in stronger 
contrast to his surroundings than was the case with 
Burton. And the deliberation of his gently daring 
rhetoric becomes the more salient in its contrast with 
the fierce abandonment of deliberation which was 
whirling Cavaliers and Puritans alike toward the 
climax of their tragedy. 

This quality of deliberation is what most clearly 
distinguishes him, the while, from English rhetori- 
cians of earlier times. When Lily made his fantastic 
phrases and paradoxes, you felt in his work some 
almost childlike gaiety of experiment; when Sidney 
wrote the stray lines of his sustained and graceful 
"Arcadia," you felt that their fantastic beauties were 
both instinctive and experimental, too; the grave 
prose of Hooker, with its constant reminiscence of 
Latin rhythm, was experimental still; and so, in a 
more masterly way, was the incisive aphorism of 
Bacon, and the apostrophic dignity of Ralegh. 
These men, one felt, were, one and all, possessed with 
a deep sense of their meaning and their purpose; and 
so was Burton. The effects they produced as mak- 
ers of prose were such effects as spring from abandon- 
ment to the mood of the moment. Now such effects 



PROSE 201 

as those of Sir Thomas Browne are too admirable, 
too grand, too excellent to spring from any mere 
intelligence and self-command. Beneath excellent 
rhetoric, as surely as beneath excellent poetry, there 
must lurk the true secret of beauty — 

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest. 

What marks Browne's place in the development of 
our prose is no lack of this ennobling force. It is 
rather the fact that this force, as it appears to him, 
is in a stage where it cannot find due expression with- 
out a constantly deliberate care for every syllable 
which would express it. 

"He that hath wife and children," writes Bacon, 
"hath given hostages to fortune." — "God, whom the 
wisest men acknowledge to be a power uneffable, and 
virtue infinite," writes Ralegh, . . . "was and is 
pleased to make Himself known by the work of the 
world." — "Divers . . . are cast," writes Burton, 
"upon this rock of solitariness for want of means, or 
out of a strong apprehension of some infirmity, dis- 
grace; or through bashfulness, rudeness, simplicity, 
they cannot apply themselves to other's company." 
— "For the world," writes Browne, in a passage for 
once exquisitely simple, "I count it not an inn, but 
a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in!" 

This deliberation, inseparable from the secret of 
his gracious dignity, seems to me the characteristic 



202 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of Browne which is most significant for us. We 
might dwell on the critical and gently sceptical tem- 
per of his still credulous learning; or on the mystic 
idealism in which he loved to soar; or, far more 
still, on the inspiring certainty of his almost limitless 
rhetorical flights. But when we had said all the 
rest, we should say again at last that we could not 
really know him if we suffered ourselves to forget 
how the secret by which he attained beauty lay no 
longer in instinctive experiment but rather in deliberate 
and conscious mastery of language. 

We have now glanced at the five monuments of prose 
with which the first half of the seventeenth century 
enriched English literature. There was other prose 
writing during these same years, no doubt; as well 
as other scholarly work, phrasing itself in scholastic 
Latin, — such as Napier's treatise on logarithms, and 
Harvey's on the circulation of the blood, — which might 
well deserve our attention. But this we may fairly 
say : apart from what we have considered, the prose 
writings of those years either have failed to attain 
a lasting place in literature, or else have proceeded 
from men whose full position in literature was won 
by subsequent work, written later. Browne, no 
doubt, published until almost the end of the Com- 
monwealth; but if he had left us only "Religio Med- 
ici" and the treatise on "Vulgar Errors," he would 
still be the Sir Thomas Browne we know. Fuller 
and others published well before the Civil Wars. But 



PROSE 203 

if Fuller had done no more he would not have been 
the real Fuller of English literature; he would have 
been only a late and fantastic maker of characters 
and of aphorisms. We should have known the 
quaintness of his ingenious, conscious, by no means 
fervid style; but we should not have understood the 
peculiar quality which makes one remember with his 
name first the "Worthies of England," next the 
"Church History," and only afterward what came 
earlier. Izaak Walton, the while, had published his 
life of Donne; but the Walton of literature is he who 
wrote those other pleasant lives, too, and most of all 
the "Complete Angler." Selden had made his "Mare 
Clausum," and Chillingworth his "Religion of Protes- 
tants"; but both the fantastic claim of international 
law and the loyal Anglicanism of the cool reasoner 
belong rather to history than to literature. Jeremy 
Taylor had begun to write ; but he had not yet proved 
himself the "Shakespeare of Divines." So Hobbes's 
"Leviathan" and Baxter's "Saint's Rest" — almost lit- 
erally contemporary — belong rather to later time than 
to the time we are considering. The actual prose 
achievement of these days in question — the work 
which did not exist in 1600 and which was complete 
when King Charles bowed his head to the axe — was 
what we have now considered: the final version of 
the Bible, the works of Bacon, Ralegh, and Burton, 
and the chief work of Sir Thomas Browne. 

During the years when the drama declined and 



2o 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

other poetry disintegrated, we have thus seen, the 
course of prose was not stationary. In the Author- 
ized Version of the Bible, composite and superhuman 
as the dialect of it has proved to be, English prose 
attained what in certain moods one may call its high- 
est excellence. The very sacredness of this work, 
however, which has so instantly and so permanently 
raised it above the level of daily life, has made it a 
thing apart — inimitable. Our other prose, mean- 
while, was governed by no such fixed and acknowl- 
edged standards as imposed themselves on our poetry. 
Rather, each writer of prose used his vehicle with a 
certain high disdain — as a thing no doubt capable of 
amenity, but not in itself so admirable that one need 
vex oneself concerning the form of it, if only its terms 
and its rhythm chanced to serve one's purpose. So 
no writer, and no school of writing imposed tradi- 
tions on the freedom of the prose which Bacon wrote, 
and Ralegh, and Burton. A free servant it remained 
for whoever had the wit to command it, still flexibly 
willing to obey. 

Then, in the hands of Browne and of Fuller, it be- 
gan at last to seem unduly fantastic — to lapse from 
the purity of the elder days; and yet those are per- 
haps wiser who would hold that the very luxuriance 
and fantasy of this mid-century rhetoric belongs 
rather to the untrammelled freedom of elder days than 
to the graceful bondage of the days soon to come. 
At least, in that half-century when poetry — dramatic 



PROSE 205 

and lyric alike — had submitted itself to the yoke of 
convention, prose was still so free that whoever used 
it might use it unchallenged, however he chose. 

In another aspect, the course of this prose had 
more in common with the course of the other litera- 
ture which we have considered together. Bacon and 
Ralegh were great men, busy with the active world, 
pervasive in the Elizabethan omnipresence of their 
versatile integrity; Burton was a solitary scholar, Sir 
Thomas Browne was a gentle and scholarly mystic. 
Vastly narrower his scope, his range, than that of the 
elder men; and part of the lasting charm he exerts 
comes from the mystic idealism with which he con- 
stantly sought, in things beyond human ken, personal 
consolation for the pains which come from the buffets 
of life. Something similar to this we traced in the 
course of lyric poetry — disintegrating from the sweet 
and comprehensive integrity of Spenser to the ex- 
quisite and tender trivialities of Herrick, or to those 
utterances of ecstatic solitude which render so mem- 
orable the records of personal devotion during the 
years when England was torn asunder. And the 
drama, meanwhile, had faded out of existence. 

A loss, then, of national integrity all this literary 
history shows us. Elizabethans had spoken instinc- 
tively to all English-speaking mankind. These later 
men deliberately uttered, each for himself, phrases 
which should express or console his own solitude, ap- 
pealing only to such as would come to share it. Dis- 



206 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

integration of national temper, it all shows, and such 
weakening of power as should come from more and 
more individual isolation. 

Had we no other records than these at which we 
have glanced, the question before us would be puz- 
zling. What had become of the elder fervor? Were 
these children of Elizabethan fathers all puny, all 
without the scope, the vigor, the pervasive intensity 
of the days which so lately had faded from the sun- 
light? 

In fact, as we all know, these days in which litera- 
ture by itself seems almost calmly eddying, were days 
when the actualities of English life were at their 
fiercest. The struggle of the mid-century, religious 
and political alike, has left surprisingly few traces in 
permanent literature. One is tempted, indeed, boldly 
to assert that it has left hardly any literary record 
at all. None the less, we can in nowise under- 
stand the period we are considering together, without 
reminding ourselves of its deepest and noblest passions. 
On them — on the conflicts which burst into the storms 
of Civil War — we must touch for a while. Even 
though this consideration take us away from pure 
literature into the domain of history, we cannot under- 
stand without it what the literature we are studying 
truly signifies concerning the national temper we are 
striving to define. 



VIII 

THE EARLIER PURITANISM 

We have now traced the general course of English 
literature during the first half of the seventeenth 
century. In 1600, we saw, this literature was in 
the full height of its Elizabethan power. It had de- 
veloped its wonderful school of drama; it had per- 
fected its peculiar and beautiful kind of pristine lyric 
poetry; it had proved our language, meanwhile, ca- 
pable of noble and varied effects in prose. Through- 
out, in brief, literature bespoke the spontaneous, en- 
thusiastic, versatile temper of Elizabethan England — 
above all, its peculiar national integrity. Somehow, 
to a degree rarely felt in human history, all Elizabeth- 
ans seem brethren. 

From this point we have followed the separate course 
of the three chief kinds of literature, the drama, lyric 
and other poetry, and prose. The drama we found to 
present a remarkably complete example of literary 
and artistic evolution; it broke from its old conven- 
tions into a spontaneous freedom which for a little 
while seemed limitless. Very soon, various masters, 
with their varying tendencies, began to impose on it 
their new conventions. Partly in obedience to these 

207 



208 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

conventions it sank toward lifelessness; partly, per- 
haps, in futile struggle against them, it ran to rank 
excess. In all aspects it declined, until the closing of 
the theatres in 1642 may be likened to the sealing of 
some tomb. Turning to the course of other poetry 
during the same years, we found it similar, but not 
identical. Under the influence of three distinct and 
powerful masters — Spenser, Jonson, and Donne — the 
tendency of lyric style grew no longer experimental, 
but rather conventionally imitative; and a school of 
poetry which in Elizabethan days was superbly com- 
prehensive became, during the time of King Charles 
I., fastidiously specialized, tending either toward ex- 
cessive mannerism or toward deliberate reaction in 
the direction of a conscious and somewhat affected 
simplicity. So far as the later work has lasted, it 
has lasted because of the excellence with which its 
extreme refinement expresses the qualities of indi- 
viduals — Herrick, for example, and the religious poets. 
Turning finally to prose, we found once more some- 
thing similar, with a marked difference. In style, 
at least, Elizabethan prose never developed into such 
dominant conventions as forced decline on the drama, 
and as emphasized the disintegration of other poetry. 
With all its comparative freedom of form, however, 
which persisted while poetry was stiffening into 
formality, prose, in substance, followed the same 
course which lyric poetry took. The prose of the 
early days seems national. In comparison with it the 



PURITANISM 209 

prose of the later time — Burton's, for example, or Sir 
Thomas Browne's — seems deliberately individual. 

In few words, if we can sum up what all this litera- 
ture has revealed of national temper, we may say that 
it indicates a period when the elder integral temper — 
with its spontaneity, its enthusiasm, and its versatility 
— swiftly disintegrated; a period, too, when this proc- 
ess of disintegration tended to produce writers who 
seem increasingly self-conscious, and consequently 
more and more deliberate ; and that, so far as its later 
manifestations reach the lasting dignity of literature, 
they reach it not because they express, like Elizabethan 
literature, a comprehensive national temper, but rather 
because, more subtly than that elder literature, they 
express the individual experience of men, mostly given 
to ideal philosophy, who sought, or who were driven 
into, personal isolation. 

Had we no other records of this half-century than 
these literary ones — the chief literature which, during 
this time, reached completion — we might well infer 
that the national temper of the moment was not only 
disintegrant, but completely decadent. And glancing 
newly at the surface of these records we might well 
fancy that one phase of its disintegrant decadence was 
a decline of the emotional power, of the passionate fer- 
vor which everywhere animates the writings of true 
Elizabethan days. An interval of cooling temper we 
might well guess the later time, as we remember the 
fading copies of the later dramatists or the harshening 



210 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

stanzas of the Spenserians, or the pretty trivialities 
of the Sons of Ben, or the quaint isolation of Burton, 
or the gentle rhapsodies of Sir Thomas Browne. 

And yet in truth, as we all know, that very period 
was the most fiercely passionate in the whole history 
of modern England. In religion, and in politics 
alike, historic forces were at work vastly beyond any 
human control for the moment; and these forces, seiz- 
ing on men despite themselves, whirling them onward 
no one could tell whither, stirred the nation to depths 
beyond any which the passions of the past had moved. 
And from this commotion arose the great tragedy of 
the Civil Wars. And from the bewildering storms of 
these there emerged, in the end, an England histori- 
cally in another state than that from which the out- 
break had torn it. 

When the chief revolution of later times occurred 
— the great Revolution of France — it was preceded 
by a generation or more of literature in which we 
can trace its growth. With this literature familiarly 
in mind, the literature of seventeenth-century Eng- 
land seems strangely separate from its history. How 
wide the separation really was may be inferred from 
the slenderness of allusion to literary matters in the 
wonderful history of Professor Gardiner. He has much 
to say of Bacon, no doubt, and of Ralegh; but very 
little of their writings which persist in literature. 
And of all the dramatists he cites hardly any but 
Massinger, in some of whose later plays there are 



PURITANISM 211 

obvious comments on the foreign diplomacy of 
King James I. In these literary conferences of 
ours, we have been able to consider the litera- 
ture of England, under King James and King 
Charles, almost as if the period had been blest 
with lack of history; and Professor Gardiner was 
able to write the history of that stirring time with 
marvellous comprehensiveness and fidelity, almost 
as if the time had lacked a literature. There 
are printed books, no doubt, enough and to spare, — 
pamphlets and broadsides, too, by the thousand — 
which set forth, in controversy, the rising contentions 
of the times; and there are records of the debates 
which so admirably foreran the parliamentary elo- 
quence of the century to follow. But, so far as 
lasting literature goes, it is surprising that neither 
English poetry nor English prose tell enough of 
the absorbing passions which distracted the nation 
even to suggest their existence to anyone who did 
not otherwise suspect it. From what we have con- 
sidered, indeed, we could infer concerning national 
temper little beyond a swift disintegration of what 
had seemed astonishingly integral, and — along with 
this national disintegration — a tendency, both in 
lyric poetry and in prose, to the quickening of indi- 
vidual consciousness. 

Both of these characteristics are doubtless true; 
but they are so far from comprehending the situation 
that they can afford us little help in the confusion into 



2i2 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which the history of these years plunges any student. 
There are few historical periods which seem, as one 
tries to understand them, more bewildering. To com- 
ment on that stormy time at all is, in a way, presump- 
tuous. Clearly, however, we can in no wise fulfil our 
purpose together without some attempt to summarize 
those passionate and conflicting years. It is clear, 
furthermore, that the historical fact which they most 
surely involved was the temporary dominance in Eng- 
land of what we may broadly call Puritanism. Eliza- 
bethan Puritanism, as we remarked long ago, was 
singularly inarticulate in literature; it left hardly any 
trace on the lasting surface of Elizabethan letters. 
Something very similar is true of Puritanism during 
the years which came between the death of Queen 
Elizabeth and the Commonwealth. Yet the national 
temper of this period was immensely influenced by the 
temper of the Puritans. To them, accordingly, we 
must devote ourselves chiefly for a while. 

In a way, the whole history of Puritanism may per- 
haps be less puzzling to Americans than to English- 
men themselves. For, as everyone knows, the settle- 
ment of New England, from which so great a part of 
our native American temper has sprung, was deeply 
impregnated with the elder Puritan ideals. And, 
although the course of time has gone far to modify 
these, it has never yet gone so far as to obliterate 
them from the New England conscience. To any 
New Englander of to-day, accordingly, the general 



PURITANISM 213 

accounts of Puritanism in England, and indeed of 
Puritanism by Englishmen, are apt to seem a little 
blind, or at least a little wanting in the matter of 
sympathetic insight. 

By the time when our proper consideration of the 
Puritan character begins — at the dawn of the seven- 
teenth century — the Reformation had done its polit- 
ical work in severing England from communion with 
Rome, and in establishing throughout the country a 
deeply rooted Protestant tradition. To a great 
degree, no doubt, this tradition may be traced to 
deliberately political causes. The story of the Refor- 
mation in England is so complicated that, in different 
moods, men have been tempted to simplify it in 
various ways which neglect its spiritual side. An 
economic fact, for example, it has been lately 
called, as if it were all explicable when we dis- 
cern how much less costly it made the saving of 
souls. In earlier times men who sought salvation 
had been directed to seek it by means of an immensely 
elaborate and increasingly expensive ecclesiastical 
machine; when a book, which anyone could buy, or 
even could read without the expense of purchase, 
was substituted for this, the positive economy of the 
reformed method confirmed the thrifty in their eager 
conviction of its absolute truth and efficacy. Again, 
the personal passions of King Henry VIII. have been 
credited with more than their due in the matter; and 
so, perhaps, has the international aspect of Protes- 



2i 4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tantism in Queen Elizabeth's time, when the world- 
contest with Spain made imperative every expedi- 
ent which could stimulate anti-Catholic prejudice 
among Englishmen. These were the days when 
Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" was chained to reading- 
desks in English churches; and chained so fast, too, 
that its honestly malignant and distorted pages 
excite, to this day, much of the traditional horror of 
Catholicism, which still haunts extreme Protestants 
on both sides of the sea. This Protestant force, to 
be sure, was not all Puritan. In King Charles's time, 
they read Foxe's "Martyrs" at Little Gidding, as 
eagerly as the New England emigrants read it at 
Boston or at Plymouth. But the Protestant propa- 
ganda tended, on the whole, to foster the spirit of 
Puritanism. 

And this Puritan spirit, deeply as it became com- 
plicated with politics and other affairs of this world, 
cannot be understood unless we penetrate beneath 
its ungainly and repellent surface. What gave it 
such vitality was not the aspect which it presented 
to external observers. For, from the beginning, the 
true Puritans were men whom the complicated forces 
set free by the Reformation, stirred, in the depths 
of their spirits, with such new realization of spiritual 
life as those who experience it are apt to call 
regeneration. 

Even in individuals, the while, and still more in 
society, the deeper religious experience of Elizabethan 



PURITANISM 215 

times had been apt to hide itself a little beneath the 
surface. Here lies one reason why the literature of 
those days tells us so little of it. Courtiers and play- 
wrights, soldiers and adventurers, even statesmen and 
churchmen were mostly concerned with the busy and 
absorbing affairs of this world. In those days, as 
always before and since, men who tended passionately 
to care chiefly for other worlds than this were apt 
to be men whom this world either neglected or 
oppressed. Of course, this is not absolutely true : 
"Though it hath pleased God," writes Ralegh, the 
most daring and unscrupulous of Elizabethan advent- 
urers, "to reserve the art of reading men's thoughts 
to Himself; yet, as the fruit tells the name of the tree, 
so do the outward works of men (so far as their cogi- 
tations are acted) give us whereof to guess at the 
rest." As one ponders on phrases like this, one grows 
to feel even in that far from Puritan adventurer, 
whose energies were so utterly devoted to worldly 
matters, a certain simplicity of faith which makes his 
naming of God something else than cant. But 
that world which Ralegh found so fit a field for his 
struggles and conquests was, in truth, a very evil 
world — full of sin, of intrigue, of trouble, of base- 
ness. And men like Ralegh, whose energies were 
given to its business, were generally far from such 
devout realization of worldly vanity as compels those 
who seek consolation to seek it in regions where truth 
must swim and quiver forever beyond human ken. 



216 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

The Puritan spirit of the earlier days was of another 
stripe. Whatever external form it chanced to as- 
sume, the men whom it animated felt beyond all 
things else the monstrous evil of earthly life; and, 
loosed, for better or worse, from the old consoling- 
authority of the united Catholic Church, they were 
forced to seek for themselves the everlasting Truth 
which should explain and atone for the sins of man- 
kind. Truth they could no longer discern in the tra- 
ditions and the mystical rites of Rome; to the Puri- 
tans these seemed diabolical corruption. The teachers 
of the Reformation proclaimed instead that truth was 
all to be found in the words of the Bible. But these 
words, taken by themselves, proved — for all their 
power and beauty — not quite within the compre- 
hension of unguided readers. Truth though they 
were they needed interpretation. So came an eager 
interest in the preaching which began to flourish so 
luxuriantly. And this preaching, on the whole, 
tended more and more to emphasize that system of 
Protestant theology which showed itself at the time, 
as it has so often shown itself since, most congenial to 
the earnest temper of English-speaking seekers for sal- 
vation. 

The system, in brief, was that of Calvin. It is 
full of technicalities, no doubt; and the points of it 
which have been matters of such heart-burning dis- 
cussion need not detain us now. Yet Calvinism, in 
outline, we cannot neglect; for unfailing faith in its 



PURITANISM 217 

broad tenets was the basis of all Puritan character. 
Without keeping the outlines of Calvinism in mind, 
accordingly, no man can understand either the origin 
and growth of our New England across seas, or the 
spiritual force which impelled the mother country to 
all the horrors of the Civil Wars. And there are few 
more surprising facts than the neglect of this simple 
matter by almost all the formal historians who, from 
that day to this, have touched on the period with which 
we are concerned together. It is hard to find any- 
where a compact, historic statement of what the Puri- 
tans believed. 

In brief, their creed was something like this: We 
can learn from Scripture that God created man, in His 
image, with absolute freedom of will. Adam chose 
to exert his will in contradiction to that of God. In 
punishment for this, God's unbending justice forbade 
that the human will, either in Adam or in his poster- 
ity, should thenceforth harmonize with the Divine. 
Humanity had made its evil choice; it must bear the 
unending penalty; for contradiction of God's will is 
clearly the deadliest of sin. So all men were doomed. 
But presently came the mercy of God, to mitigate 
His justice; and through the sacrifice of Christ, this 
mercy offered to certain human beings, chosen no 
man could tell by what impulse of Divine pleasure, 
the unspeakable grace of unmerited salvation. These 
were the elect, — that little company of saints whom 
Divine grace had freed from the penalty of sin, ances- 



218 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tral and personal. Now the essential feature of this 
penalty, imposed in Eden on all children of the Fall, 
was that no one who suffered under it — and those who 
so suffered comprised the whole human race — could 
truly exercise his will in harmony with the will of 
God. The proof, and the only proof, of freedom from 
this penalty was accordingly the discovery that, with 
Divine aid, a human being could feel his own will 
miraculously harmonious with God's. If such feeling 
could persist, if it proved durable, it was almost an 
assurance to the individual who experienced it that 
he was among the blessed few destined for salvation. 

Yet no wile of the devil was more incessant 
than that which lulled souls into false security 
by delusive mimicry of this Divine reconciliation. 
To whom God might choose to grant His grace no 
man could tell. There was always a chance that any- 
one might find himself of the elect; there was always 
a chance, as well, that the most prolonged assurance 
of this blessing might prove in the end delusive. 

The natural result of these grim convictions presently 
ensued. At heart, the typical Puritan became one 
whose whole spiritual life was passed in eager, intense 
effort, renewed day by day, to discover whether it 
was indeed possible for his errant human will to work 
in true consonance with the will of God. If so, he was 
saved; and all earthly interests shrunk into the insig- 
nificance of earth — a mere point in the infinite ex- 
panse and duration of eternity. If not, why, earthly 



PURITANISM 219 

matters mattered little, either; for whatever fleeting 
joys or grandeurs might mitigate the vexations of 
this twinkling instant of human wakefulness, the 
eternity of woe to come made them meaningless. 

It is not that any or all of the Puritans, early or 
late, would unhesitatingly have accepted so simple 
a statement of the dogmatic faith which they 
cherished. Humanity is too complex, and their grim 
theologies were too deeply involved with human com- 
plexity, to admit of a simplification which shall com- 
prehend the details of their orthodox heresies. But 
it is only when you keep in mind some such sense of 
the heart of Calvinism as my brief statement has tried 
to awaken that you can begin to understand what 
Puritanism meant, and what it uttered, and what it 
accomplished. 

Passing, for a moment, from the theological aspect 
of Calvinism, we may find in its insistence on the 
infrequency of salvation, one deep secret of its last- 
ing power. Any creed, to live, must accord with the 
facts of human experience; or at least must not flatly 
contradict them. At first sight, the transcendental 
dogmas of the Puritans may seem as remote from the 
actualities of life as were the heavens or the hells where 
they were held to work themselves out. But look at 
life as one may see it in any complicated society — 
such as that in which we live, or as that which sur- 
rounded Calvin's Geneva, or as that which passed 
from Queen Elizabeth's sovereignty to the sovereignty 



220 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of the Stuarts. An evil thing, this life, with its sins 
and its sorrows, its pains and its basenesses, its idol- 
atries and its superstitions; till there is consolation 
for the loss of little children when we reverently 
remember the knowledge which has been spared 
them. And it is not only to the righteous that this 
struggling, vexatious world must seem a hollow and 
a tragic thing. Even among those who are content 
to yield themselves to earthly ideals, seeking only 
vanities which death must take from their grasp, 
all but a few must fail. There is struggle every- 
where for existence; and only the fittest few can 
ever survive. So in terms which are themselves 
beginning to stiffen into cant, we moderns have 
attempted to generalize into the simplicity of com- 
prehensible truth the complexities which bewilder 
each fresh gazer on the phenomena of human exist- 
ence. And thus generalizing, we find ourselves, when 
we stop to consider what we mean, almost at one with 
the Puritans after all. They phrased their theologies 
in the mystic terms of other worlds than ours; their 
depravity and their election were matters of God's 
justice and grace, not of what we call the laws of Nat- 
ure. Yet the facts on which these dogmas were 
really based are just the facts which we call the 
struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. 
Throughout Nature, if one organism shall live myriads 
must perish. And one deep reason for the tenacity 
of Calvinism lies in the certainty that as you strip it 



PURITANISM 221 

of its technicalities and its mysticisms, it proves more 
and more to accord with the processes of earthly life as 
these reveal themselves to the cool scrutiny of science. 

Again, besides this rather noble appeal to the rever- 
ence for truth which resides in our higher human 
nature, the Calvinism of the Puritans appealed, more 
subtly still, to an insidious weakness of humanity. 
When New England, in Channing's time, yielded 
itself for a while to the cheerful optimism of the Uni- 
tarians, those who stayed loyal to ancestral Calvinism, 
with heroic disregard of the small worldly prizes they 
might otherwise have hoped for, were accustomed to 
console themselves by pious contemplation of what 
would happen, in eternity, to the buoyant and pros- 
perous heretics who had everything their own way in 
transcendental Boston. What was thus surely true 
of Yankee Puritanism in its decline was probably 
true of Puritanism throughout. It always had a 
singular power of comforting people who had failed 
to prosper on earth and were disposed to envy 
those who had succeeded; for if amid the most humili- 
ating misfortune, or the deepest personal obscurity, a 
man could honestly feel himself assured of salvation, he 
could look with a grim humor at the passing pageant 
and triumph of those whose infernal sufferings should 
presently and permanently enhance his saintly joy. 

Puritanism thus made appeal both to the strength 
and to the weakness of human nature. It laid mean- 
while extraordinary stress on personal experience of 



222 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

religion. The systems which base themselves on 
ecclesiastical authority naturally tend toward a cer- 
tain external formalism, attributing to their rites a 
positive efficacy with which, indeed, those rites often 
seem to edify the faithful. But if your faith, on the 
other hand, hold that you can be saved only by the 
unmerited, capricious grace of God, and that you can 
be assured of this only by knowledge that you can 
miraculously use your human will in utter harmony 
with the infinite will of His divinity, the higher you 
rise in your ecstatic contemplation of His will and His 
grace, the less you care for distracting rites, which 
after all — in their visible aspect — are only a particu- 
larly delusive kind of fleeting earthly vanity. So at 
first you are indifferent to ecclesiastical forms or even 
churchly control; and then, if this control prove gall- 
ing, you spurn it. Nothing human shall be suffered 
to stand between you and the absolute will of God. 
But how shall you be assured that what you deem 
God's will is no delusion? By searching Scripture, of 
course; by saturating yourself in the Spirit of the 
Word of God, wherein is divinely revealed, if not all 
truth, at least every ray of truth which is essential 
to salvation. The visible Scripture is only a letter — 
another human fact; but beneath this letter lies the 
Spirit. Except by Divine grace, no doubt, the Spirit 
will not reveal itself at once; the letter is a human 
veil, quivering filmy between the seeking believers 
and the truth they seek. But persevere; strain every 



PURITANISM 223 

faculty to understand assuredly the infinite and Divine 
meaning which the sacred words dimly shadow forth. 
And by and by, with ineffable irradiation, you shall 
find yourself suddenly snatched up unawares into the 
realms where Truth shines changeless above the mists 
and the errors of this frail and fleeting Time. 

Yet even here the devil may play you false. How 
shall you be assured that even your most devout 
ecstasy is not only fresh delusion, more deeply dia- 
bolical than ever, for its very likeness to holiness? 
Here, surely, the Puritans felt, the rites and the mum- 
meries with which the superstition of the ages has 
smothered what sparks of truth once strove to glow 
beneath them can serve you less than little. Your effort 
is to bring yourself, from amid all the fatal perversity 
and weakness of corrupt humanity, to regions where 
that will of yours, distorted by the sin of Adam, may 
once more miraculously find itself in everlasting 
accord with the unbending and unending purposes 
of God. From God Adam fell away in innocence; what 
shall his poor children do in this age of villainy? First 
of all, they must free themselves from all the bonds 
and the delusions of earth, fixing their eyes only on 
those regions — beyond the vision of mere humanity, 
whether alone or banded in blind and errant churches 
— where, with God Himself, rejoicing in His justice, 
adoring the miracle of His mercy, the saints may 
look down on the shadows from which none but their 
blessed company may ever emerge. 



224 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

And this hallowed company of the saints is itself 
a mystic brotherhood. The accordance of their 
regenerate spirits with the spirit of their Creator and 
their Preserver brings them into immortal harmony 
not only with Him but also with one another. The 
saints, and those who aspire, hopefully or despair- 
ingly, to their glorious fellowship, may speak to one 
another, and listen, and begin to understand. It is 
the spirit of the saints which can truly interpret 
Scripture — the spirit of the saints breathed through 
their own lips, or through the lips of others who, even 
though lost, are content to repeat the messages which 
they reverently adore, even though they may not 
share the ineffable joy of spiritual communion with 
the God from Whom they come. The Book of Life 
contains the Living Word; but to reach the heights 
from which we can really perceive how the pages 
burn with the mystic and immortal fervors of their 
inner meaning, we must be guided by the spoken 
words of those whose spirits are already bathed in 
the purifying fires of God's mercy. 

Again, we stray perhaps, to phrases and even to 
thoughts and moods which the Puritans would never 
have quite acknowledged as their own. Yet some 
such temper as must underlie the thoughts and the 
moods of devotion which we have just striven sympa- 
thetically to awaken seems beyond doubt to have ani- 
mated the whole Puritan world. Sympathizing with 
it, accordingly, even though we forget the terms in 



PURITANISM 225 

which amid errors of our own we have attempted to 
phrase it, we can hardly fail sympathetically to under- 
stand why the Puritans, in their worship, precisely 
reversed the traditional opinion and practice of Ca- 
tholicism. To the traditional Church, the essence of 
worship lay in observance of the consecrated and mys- 
tic rites by which God had bidden His ministers 
symbolize to humanity the infinite mysteries of His 
truth. And those served God best who were rewarded 
for their faithfulness by a sense of their fellowship in 
holy sacrament with the vast body of His servants 
who throughout the Christian centuries have com- 
posed the visible Church. There was always Catholic 
preaching, no doubt; but this preaching was a second- 
ary matter. You might listen or not as you 
preferred. The preacher, if he were faithful, spoke 
not for himself, but for the Church of which he was 
an officer; and the soul of his office lay not in his words 
but in his ministrations. Accept these, and let his 
words be what they might. Indeed, if you were so 
disposed, you might even doubt the wisdom of listen- 
ing to any preacher whomsoever ; for, at best, preach- 
ers were only men, who might yield to vain tempta- 
tions, and speak not what the Church taught, but what 
their erring selves chose to fancy. Abandon yourself 
to the blessed mysteries of sacrament, then, and let 
preaching hold its minor place if it would. You need 
no sermons to guide you heavenward ; rather, at best, 
sermons are earthly edifications. 



226 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

To the Puritans, on the other hand, preaching was 
all in all. From the lips of sanctified divines could 
come, as from no other conduits, the living spirit of 
God; and every form or device was a blinding evil, 
which should distract attention from the words of the 
preacher to the ceremonies of the minister. Distract- 
ing they found even the comparative lifelessness of 
a formal ritual, as contrasted with the fervor of new- 
made prayer; distracting, too, they found the atti- 
tudes of reverence which had been deadened into 
formalism by ancestral custom; more distracting still 
they found the pageantry of vestments, and altars 
and painted glass, and even the glorious music of 
organs and chants which, however inspiring, filled 
their ears with nothing higher than the momentary 
harmonies of this sinful earth. 

Nor was it only as a distraction from the efficacies 
of preaching that the Puritans distrusted and con- 
demned those forms in which the Anglican authorities 
and worshippers of King Charles's time discerned only 
the beauty of holiness. This very beauty of earthly 
holiness, the Puritans felt, might well dim over eyes 
to the unspeakably greater beauty of that holiness 
which shines beyond the mists of earth. These Puri- 
tans have often been declared by posterity to have 
lacked imagination. In the years when all the wealth 
of Elizabethan literature, and the literature we have 
glanced at since, enriched our world; in the years 
when, whatever its errors and its vices, the surface of 



PURITANISM 227 

English life glowed with a pageant-like brilliancy 
which has hardly been shadowed in later times, the 
Puritans, plain in dress, severe in aspect, often rude of 
phrase, produced — at least in so characteristic a form 
that we can assert it all and only theirs — little other 
lasting utterance than endless, acrid, crabbed sermons, 
or pamphlets, or books of controversy. To under- 
stand how these men, even in imagination, too, were 
brethren of the generation which, in other ways, added 
most of all during those before us to the imaginative 
wealth of our common race, needs nowadays an effort 
of imagination in ourselves. 

It is hard to wrest ourselves from this twentieth 
century to the regions where the Puritan fore- 
fathers of New England found themselves three hun- 
dred years ago. It is hard to understand that the 
most ardent imagination — like the most soaring 
ambition — often lacks the aspect by which we recog- 
nize the quality in its lesser form. But make the 
effort yourself, to-day; yield yourself for the instant 
to the mood, which, a little while ago, we were 
striving to revive together. Figure to yourself that 
every energy of your being is consciously, pain- 
fully, ardently devoted to an effort to assure your- 
self that your will is at one with that of God. Stop, 
then, for an instant. Reflect, as you contemplate 
that effort, how in essence it is an attempt to realize 
in terms of the human mind the infinite glories of 
unfathomable Divinity. Reflect how deeply, how 



228 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

immutably this purpose must transcend any human 
power which strives to accomplish it. Understand 
how that elder race of Puritans knew their human 
weakness as well as you know yours; but how they 
hoped, against despair, that God's miraculous mercy 
would grant, to one or to another, the ineffable mys- 
tery of His all-seeing grace. And you shall feel, by 
and by, how all the imaginative power of our most 
imaginative elder time could lose itself unperceived 
in this illimitable aspiration; leaving for the sight of 
men only an exterior which seemed utterly to lack 
that imaginative life whose utmost powers were ex- 
hausted by the unspeakable passions of the spirit. 
There are few more wonderful experiences possible 
than that which will come to you if you have patience 
to pore over some musty, crabbed Puritan sermon 
until the words begin to swim, and their meaning to 
fade even beyond its harsh obscurities, and, of a 
sudden, you are aware that this is only another dar- 
ing, futile, fleeting effort to express in the passing 
terms of earth an ecstatic sense of the eternal mys- 
teries above — those mysteries amid whose glories the 
spirits of the saints may triumphantly and securely 
emerge from the errors and distortions of corrupt 
human will into everlasting communion with the vast 
justice and mercy of Omnipotence. 

We need not marvel that no works of art came 
from these men. The unspeakable magnitude of 
their awakened spiritual purpose caused them 






PURITANISM 229 

instinctively, as well as deliberately, to distrust, to 
disdain, to condemn the distracting trivialties of 
earthly beauty, fading at its noblest like the flowers 
with which it decked its passing pageants. Like the 
lesser pageants and vanities, — like the courts, and the 
play-houses, and all the rest, — the very beauty of 
earthly holiness, in the formal ceremonies of what- 
ever creed, seemed to the Puritans only obstacles 
embarrassing the vision which would lose itself 
in ecstatic contemplation of the glories which no time 
nor circumstance can ever change or end. 

This intense, transcendental idealism surely under- 
lay the grotesque, uncouth exterior of the elder 
Puritans; and vitalized the spirit which was to grow 
so sturdily during the years when it made so little 
mark on literature. Essentially heretical, in the sense 
that it threw on each man who accepted its teaching 
the duty and the responsibility of free spiritual choice, 
this spirit was doomed to clash with any severe or 
formal assertion of spiritual authority. For a while 
ecclesiastical control of it was not oppressive; yet 
there was never quite such freedom from this as should 
suffer it, like unopposed heresy, to evaporate into 
individual vagary. And, as the generations began 
to pass, and Puritanism itself began to be a new tra- 
dition, with its own dogmas and its own worthies, 
its own orthodoxies and solidarities, there began to 
arise, or at least to define itself, that Anglican oppo- 
sition to it which was as honest as itself. 



2 3 o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

As this tendency increased, and moved fatally tow- 
ard its acme in the tragically futile efforts of Arch- 
bishop Laud to make the whole English church 
conform in the beauty of holiness, the dogmas of 
Puritanism hardened into freshly aggressive uncouth- 
ness. Then there arose inevitably, in the spiritual 
life of England, one of those deep mutual misunder- 
standings which must always underlie honest warfare. 
Good men, in this world, seek righteousness; but their 
paths are divers; and when two have travelled long 
apart, and look at one another from afar, each seems 
to the other bound for perdition. Neither can dis- 
cern, or will stop to remember, the purpose which 
they hold in common. Both are blinded by the per- 
ception that their paths are parted. And so, when 
the troubles began to thicken, the Anglicans seemed 
to the Puritans harking back to the enslaving and 
damnable superstitions of ancestral Rome; and to 
the Anglicans the Puritans seemed little but prag- 
matic and turbulent anarchists. 

By this time we have strayed far from all precise 
fact, and very far from precise chronology. In such 
generalizations as have been forced upon us, there is 
deep danger of unmeaning and misleading vague- 
ness. Yet, if we reflect, we shall perceive that, to 
this moment, we have considered Puritanism only in 
its inner and spiritual aspect. Throughout its course, 
it surely had another; its nature was one which must 
meddle with the conduct of this world. If the deepest 



PURITANISM 231 

conviction of your being become a belief that your 
erring human will has been brought miraculously into 
harmony with the will of God, the Ruler of the Uni- 
verse, you cannot be indifferent to the conduct of 
God's creatures, your fellow-men. And so, now and 
again, the Puritans openly attacked the ungodly 
vagaries of other than themselves — the earthly 
splendors and pretensions of prelacy, for example; 
the vanities and corruption of those growing centres 
of sin, the public theatres; the distracting wickedness 
of health-drinking, and of love-locks; and whatever 
else. But, at first and for long, the Puritans were not 
apt to forget the Divine injunction that men are to 
render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's. 
They were eager, as few other companies in history 
have ever been, that life, in all its earthly aspects, 
should obey the dictates of duty — of everlasting 
right. But they were willing to admit on the earth 
the potency of those rights by which ancestral law 
had directed the course of history. 

Yet there could be no doubt that something like 
established law supported the crescent assertion of 
ecclesiastica> power which strove to suppress the 
uncouth outward manifestations of their ineffable 
inward fervor. So when the authority of the Church 
in which they still claimed membership bade them 
observe the external decorum which they had con- 
scientiously disdained, a question arose which went 
deeper than any man quite foresaw. The question 



232 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

at first seemed one of surplices and of genuflexions, 
of reverenced altars or communion tables ostenta- 
tiously used for secular purposes, of printed liturgies 
or prayers and sermons which should breathe the in- 
spiration of the individually devout elect of God. But 
to the Puritans it soon became rather a question of 
how, if at all, the right they were divinely bidden to 
follow could be brought into accord with the rights 
to which ancestral law had limited their earthly privi- 
leges as Englishmen. 

Dangerous though catch-words be, it will repay us 
to remember these two: right and rights. Right is 
an obligation sanctioned by duty and by ideal jus- 
tice, springing from the heavens above; rights are 
privileges and duties assured mankind by the human 
laws under which they live. Right is divinely 
abstract ; rights are humanly concrete. And in earthly 
affairs, the two can seldom quite coincide. Again 
and again, throughout history, there have accordingly 
come efforts to reform human affairs in accordance 
with abstract ideals — to impose on the distortions or 
the errors of rights, as defined by the passing and 
various systems of human law, the higher authority 
of ideal right. Sometimes these efforts are merely 
reforms; sometimes they are revolutions. Almost 
always they subtly and unexpectedly alter the course 
of society and thus affect the development of national 
temper. They hardly ever accomplish precisely what 
they so eagerly and fervently believe that they shall; 



PURITANISM 233 

for though right be divine in its ideal origin, the 
phrasing of its dictates in human terms is sure to dim 
its purity; and although rights, in epochs of aberra- 
tion and oppression, be never so distorted, they surely 
have their origin in centuries of experience which 
has proved them favorable to human safety and pros- 
perity. In a way, one may assert, the noblest aspira- 
tion of practical politics is that right and rights may 
be made, as nearly as possible, to agree. Both must 
always exist; both must always be recognized; neither 
may safely be suffered quite to prevail over the other. 
Those epochs are happiest, they say, which have no 
history; another way of phrasing this meaning were 
to assert those epochs most happy when for a little 
while the ideals of right and the state of rights are 
enough at peace to leave men free in their individual 
courses toward wealth and righteousness. 

Now, when Puritanism, in the early years of the 
seventeenth century, found its ideal of right more and 
more at odds with so many of the rights which, at 
least formally, were asserted by the civil and eccle- 
siastical law of England, there came to it a deep ques- 
tion. Just then, even though Puritanism had pos- 
sessed the unity and the force demanded for organized 
resistance, the time was not ripe for the Civil Wars 
so soon to come. Yet the Puritans could not consci- 
entiously yield to the authority which, misunderstood 
and misunderstanding, was doing its utmost to curb 
them. The moment might consequently have been 



234 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

expected to produce, at least in controversy, some 
passionate literary assertion of Puritanism, — of deter- 
mination that when right and rights clash, right must 
prevail, — which should have emerged into the lasting 
eminence of literature. For such a document, I think, 
we may search English literature, at least before Mil- 
ton's time, in vain. But the very columns in which 
the chronology of English literature is anywhere 
recorded would reveal, at precisely this period, a fact 
in history, trivial in seeming at the moment but incal- 
culable in its consequence, which, without undue fan- 
tasy, we may call the true national expression of 
Elizabethan Puritanism. 

In the days which are now in our minds, the seven- 
teenth century was still in its late youth, and as yet 
Puritanism had made no literary record of its passion- 
ate intensity. But remember two simple facts: 
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Before 1630 the 
Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachu- 
setts Bay had planted their colonies. An instant of 
reflection will assure us of one fact which those mere 
dates irrefutably imply. Every man of mature years 
in those emigrant companies of ancestral Americans 
had been born in the integral and spacious days 
of the great Queen. Every one of them was 
literally one who, in other than Puritan paths of 
English life, might have mingled with the drama- 
tists, and the poets, and the great makers of 
our pristine prose whose works together comprise 



PURITANISM 235 

the literature which we call Elizabethan. Every one 
of them might have listened to the words which fell 
from the lips of those namelessly remembered immor- 
tals whose learned labors finally consecrated the 
terms of the English Bible. And every one of them 
was a devoted Puritan. Their emigration was im- 
pelled by the fervent spirit of their faith. It was no 
such abstract love of ideal liberty as the superstitious 
traditions of our later democracy have fondly ascribed 
to them, which led them painfully to seek refuge in 
what Cotton Mather fitly called the solitudes of an 
American desert. The true impulse which founded 
New England was a hope that, in the unhampered 
wilderness of a virgin continent, the Puritans might 
so adjust their lives that right and rights should agree 
as nowhere else on earth. If you seek, then, for the 
great and lasting human expression of Elizabethan 
Puritanism, you shall not find it in literature; but turn- 
ing your eyes across the seas, you shall find it there, 
in the planting of New England, and in the still vital 
historical growth which has sprung from that seed. 

For, in that continent of forest and of wilderness, 
which even to-day is hardly yet subjected to the ser- 
vice of man, there was no external force which could 
impose on the immigrant fathers other ideals than 
their own. Limited and dogmatic enough these were, 
beyond peradventure; as far from tolerance or devo- 
tion to abstract ideals of liberty as ever were those 
of Strafford, or of Laud, or of Charles himself. 



236 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

But, whatever else, these Puritan ideals were sturdy 
in their determined hope that human rights should 
be controlled by the Divine right which springs 
not from kings or bishops, but straight from the spirit 
of God — that a deeper principle than law itself could, 
and should, dominate and inspire a newly durable and 
vital law. And, as the fathers fell away one by one, 
and the generations of their children one by one stood 
in their places, the ideals which had been revolu- 
tionary in the old world acquired in the new the 
ineffable sanction of revered tradition. This paradox 
of ideality behind law, strengthened by three centuries 
of ancestral faith, is the deepest secret of American 
temper to-day. The changes of time have changed 
its utterances and its aspect; but they have never 
quenched its spirit. 

New England, no doubt, is past its zenith; but even 
to this day it is to New England that those must turn 
who would understand, in all the mysterious and inef- 
fable certainty of the spirit, the abiding nature of 
pristine Puritanism. For the lasting human expres- 
sion of that intense form of Elizabethan life was unlike 
the rest. Elizabethan existence expressed itself in lit- 
erature which shall live as long as our language. 
Elizabethan Puritanism, the while, created our New 
England, whose shadow still hovers in the sunshine. 



IX 

THE LATER PURITANISM 

We have been compelled to turn aside from our 
contemplation of literature by itself, for the literature 
with which we are concerned can hardly be under- 
stood without some recognition of the forces which, 
while it was so swiftly disintegrating, absorbed the 
passion of the English race. In the middle of the 
seventeenth century, we have seen, the dominant 
assertion of Puritanism was a fact so far more 
important than any merely literary one, and yet so 
closely allied with the change in national temper 
which the period involved, that, in our study of 
national temper, we were bound to give ourselves 
account of it. 

Accordingly we attempted first to grasp the chief 
tenets of Calvinism, the creed which the Puritans 
believed to comprise the truth. To them, we 
found, the Fall of Man, the doomed rebellion 
of the human will, the unmerited mercy of salva- 
tion granted through Christ to God's elect, and 
the consequent chance that any man might find his 
will divinely freed from the just doom of our race, 
were no formal dogmas. They were dogmas which 

237 



238 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

possessed the Puritan imagination, and exhausted 
its power, with all the certainty of supreme reality. 
Next, endeavoring for the moment to assume their 
point of view, we attempted to understand how the 
world in which the Puritans were placed presented 
itself to their devout eyes. So presently we came to 
perceive how inevitably there arose in England a con- 
scious conflict between the ideals of right and of, 
rights — how, to earnest men, the law of God and the 
laws of men must have seemed sundered or sunder- 
ing; and therefore how the deepest energies of the 
Puritans, and all the passions which in earlier days 
had been free to animate all manner of expression, 
were concentrated in efforts to make right and rights 
agree. And finally we remarked that, though the 
earlier phases of this conflict have left little, if any, 
trace which has emerged into the lasting life of letters, 
the founding of New England, in the midst of the 
growing troubles, may literally be regarded as the 
most concrete and permanent expression of Eliza- 
bethan Puritanism. Instead of making books, the 
Puritans of the elder time unwittingly made a nation, 
which to this day preserves immutable traces of their 
spirit. 

This necessary digression from our consideration 
of literature is not yet finished. Before returning to 
our true subject, we must follow not only the later 
course of Puritanism in England, but also its course 
in that New England, across the seas, which 



PURITANISM 239 

almost from the very settlement was definitely 
parted from the mother country. After we have 
considered these matters, and only then, we shall 
be free to revert to literature — our proper busi- 
ness together. Glancing, with these other matters 
in mind, at the course which literature took in Eng- 
land after the Elizabethan spirit had faded, we may 
end, perhaps, even though of necessity our glance 
must be hasty, by discerning more clearly than before 
the fact which to my mind seems most significant when 
Englishmen and Americans discuss their common his- 
tory together — namely, how the nation which to-day 
is England and the nation which to-day is America 
have come, for so long, to diverge. 

In the years when New England was founded, about 
the time when King Charles came to the throne, 
the historic life of the mother country was beginning 
to move more swiftly than men realized. The emi- 
grant Puritans who withdrew themselves to the 
wilderness where, presently, they were to plant a 
nation, left behind them an England in which their 
creed and their policy seemed far from dominant. 
One may doubt, indeed, whether any stray traveller 
to England toward the end of King James's reign, or 
during the earlier days of King Charles I., would 
much have remarked, or indeed need much have 
noticed, the existence then of those seekers for right- 
eousness who were destined, before long, to over- 
throw the monarchy for a while. The kind of incident 



240 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

most apt to attract a careless eye was that Prynne's 
"Histriomastix" cost him his ears, and sent rid- 
ing across London a wonderful procession from 
the Inns of Court, whence gentlemen came to play 
before the King and Queen, in atonement for 
this indiscretion of one among their fellows, the 
most elaborate masque which as yet had dribbled 
from the pen of Shirley. King Charles himself, of 
course, was staid enough in his personal life; but,' 
amid the lax fashions of his time, this feature of his 
character appeared almost in the light of an eccentric- 
ity. The court which gathered about him, and the 
lesser public which still thronged the theatres where the 
drama was sinking so deeply into its corruption — the 
dominant authorities of the Church, too, attempting 
to force upon England external conformity in the 
ritual beauty of holiness, — were for the moment 
the figures which to careless observers must have 
seemed most conspicuous. And more and more cer- 
tainly these figures were coming to embody character- 
istics which marked them, in the eyes of fervent 
Calvinists, as children of perdition. 

The course which Puritan feeling began to take 
was inevitable. Fancy yourself, if you can, some 
honest Puritan of those days, convinced that no other 
path than that which you were striving to tread could 
even lead toward salvation — far less could approach 
its full and ineffable reality. Then picture to your- 
self the wrath with which you would have resented 



PURITANISM 241 

the growingly intolerant formalism of the established 
Church — silencing the preachers and the lecturers 
from whose lips your ears were thirsting to drink the 
living truth; replacing them by rites in which you 
could perceive only the likeness of Popish mummery 
and genuflexion; thrusting altar-wise to the wall the 
tables where you held that Scripture bade you sit 
at ease when you would share in the Lord's Supper; 
drowning the voice of heartfelt prayer in the ritual 
phrases of a conventional liturgy, or in the distracting 
strains of ingeniously interwoven chants. Picture to 
yourself, too, the grievous indignation with which you 
would have watched the gay corruption of courtly 
fashion, and of the lesser fashion which aped it. The 
vanities of this earthly life, with which such fashion 
seemed impiously content, were twining themselves 
into more and more inextricable mazes of sinful 
intrigue; and this same godless fashion delighted to 
parody these unholy vanities in comedies which 
it was welcome to play before the very eyes of your 
ecclesiastical persecutors — graceless perverters of 
their divine office. 

As time began to pass — the days gathering them- 
selves into weeks, the weeks into months, the months 
into years — there would have sunk more and more 
deeply into your soul the conviction that the 
forces arrayed against you were all and utterly 
evil. And long before you had phrased to your- 
self in formal consciousness the resolution which 



242 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

was bound to arise within you, that resolution would 
surely have become an instinctive part of your 
habitual inner life. Even though the human rights 
of passing law might foster and protect this course 
of evil, the everlasting right, which must finally sur- 
mount and control all the rights of mere humanity, 
bade you protest against the course of earthly affairs, 
in the name of the Lord on High. What is more, if 
your cry of protest should awaken no answering 
change of heart among those who were rising up 
against you, why, next to cries must come deeds. 

Yet if the troubles and dissensions which vexed 
England had been only matters of religion, of the 
spirit, the course of English history would hardly have 
been that which it actually took. As everyone 
remembers, however, the whole question was compli- 
cated with political troubles as well. Under Eliza- 
beth, one may broadly say, the royal power had 
shared in the characteristic integrity of her time; 
on the whole, its spirit had kept in touch with 
the spirit of the country. Under James and Charles 
there came a change. The sovereign found himself 
more and more at odds with that powerful part of 
the people who were at once sufficiently advanced to 
feel alert interest in public affairs, and yet not so emi- 
nent as to be closely connected with the life and the 
intrigues of the court or of the higher politics. 

The details of the confused and increasing troubles 
which ensued are far too intricate even for mention 






PURITANISM 243 

now. Unsatisfactory as generalization must be, we 
are forced to generalize. In brief, to sum up the his- 
tory which preceded the actual outbreak of Civil 
War, the extravagance and the incompetence — one 
may almost say the extravagant impotence — of the 
royal government involved England in expenses far 
beyond the national income. To meet these expenses 
Parliament was again and again called on for unusual 
grants of money. Thereupon Parliament began to 
criticise the conduct of the state with increasing bold- 
ness; and presently it went so far as to refuse the 
needful grants, except on conditions which involved, 
on its own part, a degree of interference with the 
conduct of the state which the King held revolu- 
tionary. The King accordingly endeavored to carry 
on the government without recourse to Parliament, 
and to supply himself with the requisite funds by 
means of certain impositions which he honestly be- 
lieved to be based on legal precedent. The people on 
whom these impositions fell, on the other hand, were 
disposed with equal honesty to believe the impositions 
arbitrary, and therefore to hold the King revolu- 
tionary in turn. When at last, accordingly, after an 
interval of years, the summoning of new Parliaments 
proved unavoidable, the bodies which assembled, in 
response to the calls, turned out — in spite of the con- 
ditions which then rendered popular election so far 
from an utterance of the voice of the people — to be 
composed largely of men who fervently believed that 



244 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the course taken by the royal authority had deeply 
and dangerously violated their ancestral rights as 
Englishmen. 

Taken by itself, like the austere convictions of the 
Puritans taken by themselves, this political crisis 
could hardly have led to all which followed. But the 
two currents of ardent protestant feeling tended to 
merge. It is a grave error to suppose that the full 
Puritan spirit, in all its phases, took the Parliament- 
ary side, or that all the men who followed the King in 
the Civil Wars were free from Puritan taint. This 
popular tradition, however, comes near enough to the 
truth not to be contemptible. In fact, the section 
of Parliament which soon began to control its con- 
duct was largely composed of men in whom the 
Puritan spirit ran deep. The misgovernment of the 
King and of his advisers, they presently held, had 
violated the civil rights and liberties of England; 
so they impeached Strafford. The misgovernment 
of the Church, they presently held in turn, had not 
only violated the religious rights and liberties — if 
indeed at such a moment anyone dreamed of true 
religious liberties — which were ancestrally English; 
but in so doing it had violated, more impiously still, 
that eternal right which is sanctioned by the will of 
God; so they sent Laud, as well, to the block. And 
the confusion grew ever worse confounded. 

Yet blindly bewildering as the troublous history 
is, one can feel that on the whole the men who found 



PURITANISM 245 

themselves forced into Parliamentary leadership began 
their work with no intention of proceeding beyond 
the law. They meant, in the beginning, only to main- 
tain the hereditary rights of Englishmen and the 
eternal right of the Gospel. The current of history 
whirled them onward unawares. Before long, with 
little sense that they had exceeded their original pur- 
pose, — with small realization, it would seem, of all 
which they actually claimed, — they began to assert 
in the name of Parliament, a degree of authority 
which, once admitted, would amount to acknowledged 
Parliamentary sovereignty, reducing royalty to an 
empty name. This claim, of Parliamentary sover- 
eignty, was quite as revolutionary as any claim of 
royalists that absolute and divine right resides in the 
person of the King. Yet, as one tries to see the Par- 
liamentary Puritans as they saw themselves, one is 
little apt to believe that they ever suspected them- 
selves to be revolutionists. To themselves, rather, 
they seemed only Englishmen, unflinchingly deter- 
mined to maintain, to protect, and to defend the 
rights which had been confided to them by their 
fathers. In so doing, however, they believed them- 
selves supported by a power higher than any which 
can be derived from earth; as Christians, edified by 
the inexpressible and superficially distorted fervor of 
Calvinistic imagination, they never doubted them- 
selves to be the human repositories of divinely 
revealed truth. Their assertion of rights they believed 



246 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

to be sanctioned by all the omnipotence of absolute 
right. 

So when Parliamentarianism almost unwittingly 
proceeded to those virtual assertions of Parliamentary 
sovereignty which inevitably involved the tragedy of 
the Civil Wars, the assertions were overwhelmingly ani- 
mated by all the force of uncompromising moral con- 
viction which dwelt in honest Puritanism. Nowadays 
the dry logic of that grim creed seems far from stir- 
ring, in the crabbed pages which record its intricacies; 
and to unregenerate ears the drawls or the shouts of 
pious exhortation which excited Puritan fervor must 
always have sounded noisy, hypocritical and canting. 
But beneath this unwinsome exterior there burned, 
in the true Puritans, ecstatic fires of imaginative 
aspiration. It was still within the hope of any among 
them that he might be brought miraculously into that 
reconciled harmony with the purposes of God from 
which the sin of Adam had threatened to exclude all 
humanity. 

And so came a sort of divine madness. These 
men, or many of the most earnest among them, 
came to believe that even though they might person- 
ally be lost, — though they themselves might never 
truly share in the will of God, — they might at least 
recognize God's will, admit it, proclaim it. They 
came to believe, furthermore, that, for all the sins and 
follies of this world, good men — devout servants of 
God — could, if they would make the effort with all 



PURITANISM 247 

their hearts, impose some semblance of the Divine will 
on their erring fellows. By simulating the elect, in 
words and deeds which now seem like some holy 
comedy of unmeant hypocrisy, anyone, they appear 
to have believed, might at least serve as an instru- 
ment of God's pleasure; and thus, perhaps, though 
lost himself, he might help to win eternal mercy for 
his posterity. In religious discipline, which, in spite 
of opposition and oppression, these enthusiasts had 
been able to control among themselves, their insist- 
ence on absolute right had begun to restore what 
they believed to be a pristine purity of Christian wor- 
ship. In this purity of worship they found at once 
edification and sanction for their growing faith that 
they might proceed to impose absolute right on mat- 
ters civil as well. 

It is first and chiefly, no doubt, these ardors 
of Puritanism which reveal what was truly the 
deepest passion of England in that mid-seventeenth 
century. Earnest Englishmen had come passionately 
to believe that the affairs of men can be controlled 
by that absolute right which resides in the will of 
God; and when earnest men passionately cherish 
such belief as this, it is bound to involve a conse- 
quent determination that since human affairs can be 
so controlled they must be. In this conviction and 
determination, however, the Puritans did not stand 
alone. When their ardor flamed into full revo- 
lutionary assertion of Parliamentary sovereignty, it 



248 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

was confronted with other convictions and other 
assertions as sincere and as devoted as their own. 
The Royalists — the Cavaliers, as the fashion of liter- 
ature has come to name them — were not blind con- 
servatives. Rather, at their best, they were men who 
fervently believed that the storms of the times could 
be weathered only by a course widely different from 
that which Parliament had taken. That God's will 
ought to be done, on earth as it is in heaven, all earnest 
men, on either side, were agreed. The question which 
most deeply divided earnest men concerned the means 
by which God had chosen to indicate His will to man- 
kind. 

The Puritans, as we have seen, pinned their faith 
to the Bible, as the Bible was interpreted by 
Calvinistic theology. They turned, accordingly, to 
their godly preachers for guidance toward that 
ecstatic communion with divinity for which all might 
hope, though so few might attain it. Such commun- 
ion, once attained, meant not only that those who 
could share it should enjoy the priceless boon of 
salvation; it meant, as well, and for that very reason, 
that the human wills of the regenerate, in their recon- 
ciled harmony with the will of God, were supremely 
right in their purposes. Such a creed appeals very 
powerfully to the kind of energetic men whom we call 
self-reliant ; and is terribly open to the danger of head- 
strong self-assertion, which grows the more mischiev- 
ous as the devoted assertors of themselves grow more 
and more apt to forget each his essential peculiarities. 



PURITANISM 249 

There is another kind of men, neither worse than the 
self-reliant nor better, but different, who rely, for help 
in the struggles of this world, not on themselves, but on 
others. To such as these, even though they be as 
willing as any Puritan to admit the graceless deprav- 
ity of humanity, the true voice of right — however 
confused by the transitory errors of mankind — is 
uttered by no mere book, however sacred, nor yet by 
the exasperating or edifying lips of any preacher. 
Rather it comes to us through those visible human 
authorities, of Church and of State alike, to whom 
God, in His inscrutable wisdom, has bidden lesser men 
be subject. It is not that kings or bishops are sinless 
or irresponsible. It is rather that they are God's 
officers, in just such sense as that in which soldiers, 
irrespective of their personal character, are officers 
of the governments which they enforce or defend. 
And the Divine power which commissions Church and 
State is the power which alone can call them to 
account. We must be content to let them : 

God's the hand — 
No earthly one — which may chastise the wrongs 
That royal sinners wreak, whirling along 
To their damnation, deeper still than ours, 
When God shall ask them trembling how they bore 
The trust His chrism imposed. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the acci- 
dents of English history had given to the sovereign 



250 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

a double character, which made a singularly direct 
appeal to such temper as this. For he was head 
not only of the state but also of the English church. 
Accordingly, the deeper and more earnest spirits who 
supported the sovereignty of the King against the 
sovereignty of Parliament tended more and more to 
recognize in Charles, despite those personal weak- 
nesses which had so subtly shaken his authority, the 
ruler whom they were bidden to serve not only by the 
laws of man, but also by the law of God. So when 
the Puritans and the Parliamentarians endeavored 
to impose their authority on England, they were met 
by opponents as sincere as themselves. The Royal- 
ists, the Cavaliers, were less austere, less profoundly 
enthusiastic; but their superficial frivolity may well 
mislead us into a misunderstanding as deep as that 
which has so often been based on the superficial cant 
and grotesqueness of the Puritans. In truth, both 
sides were equally in earnest. When Puritanism 
sought to remould the laws and the rights of England 
into those new forms which it believed sanctioned by 
the Divine right set down in Scripture and interpreted 
by the saints, it was met by an equally unbending 
determination that those laws and rights should rather 
be reduced to other new forms, proclaimed and sanc- 
tioned by the divine right inherent in the King. 

Amid all the confusion of that tragic time we can 
constantly discern the outline of this tragic conflict. 
On either side there was plenty of human weakness, 



PURITANISM 251 

plenty of open sin, plenty of such endless error and 
distortion as still implants in many minds the con- 
viction that human nature must be essentially wicked. 
Of a given man, however earnest, you might often 
be at pains to guess on which side he should soon be 
found. There were treasons in those days, too, as in all 
others; and there were honestly despairing uncertain- 
ties, and deep changes of heart. And beneath the 
troublous, bewildering surface of that tempestuous 
life, where the only sure fact seems that the structure 
of the elder world was everywhere crumbling, there 
were surging historical forces as certain and as mys- 
terious as those electric forces which we are only just 
beginning to harness. As one reads the history of those 
seventeenth century turmoils, or attempts to explore 
the records on which that history is based, one's brain 
reels, like the brains of those who were striving — for 
the while so vainly — to bring order out of the crash- 
ing chaos. But when one lays the records down, and 
strives by pondering to discern some trace of the se- 
cret of their teaching, one is apt to feel slowly defining 
itself the verity of a world-old lesson — yet a lesson 
which men have never yet learned so well that it shall 
serve their weakness in hours of conflict. 

There is somewhere a half-forgotten parable, of one 
who saw God, and bowed his head, adoring. Then 
those about him, whose eyes were blinded, asked 
wherefore he bowed his head. So, lifting up his face, 
he strove to tell them how he saw God. But even 



252 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

as he strove, his eyes were blinded; and he saw God 
no more. So he could not make them true answer. 
And as for them, they could not perceive that there 
was any truth in him. 

What fell out the parable does not tell. It is enough 
that one who could lose himself in ecstatic adoration 
could find no words which should help others to share 
in such mystic afflations as for a glorious instant of 
eternity had suffused his being; nor could those others 
understand how this strange parting from the rest of 
one among their fellows could mean anything else 
than the dumb or stammering madness of its outward 
aspect. And indeed the utterances of sincere enthu- 
siasm are really tinged with some semi-divine mad- 
ness or folly. When men are even stirred by faith in 
the absolute right of their cause, — still more, when 
such faith possesses and irradiates their whole consci- 
ousness, — they seem fatally prevented from the knowl- 
edge that the range of truth is infinite, illimitable. A 
little of it, and perhaps more than a little, they per- 
ceive in all the celestial intensity of its glory. But 
when they honestly and passionately assert that this 
truth which they perceive is the whole truth, all their 
honesty cannot keep them from uttering the beginning 
of implicit and insidious falsehood, the more danger- 
ous for its very sincerity. They have fallen into the 
blinding error of denial that others than they can per- 
ceive any aspect of truth at all. It is the old story of 
the gold and silver shield. 



PURITANISM 253 

Shrewd old Increase Mather — the greatest of the 
native Puritans of Massachusetts — learned this lesson 
well. Like many devout men of his day, he was 
rewarded more than once, after long fasting and 
vigil, by admission to what seemed to him the actual 
presence of God. And at first he would sometimes 
try to proclaim the messages with which, in these mys- 
tic interviews, God had charged him. But later he 
refrained from confiding them even to the pages of 
his private diaries, because experience had taught him 
that "the Flights of a Soul rapt up into a more Inti- 
mate Conversation with Heaven, are such as cannot 
be exactly Remembered with the Happy partakers 
of them." 

Few men of any time, however, have been able thus to 
season enthusiasm with prudence. So when Royal- 
ists and Parliamentarians, Anglicans and Puritans, 
Cavaliers and Roundheads, faced one another in 
mutual defiance, neither could see much more than 
the rift between them, widening into the pit of de- 
struction into which the holy fervor of each side 
believed that eternal righteousness bade it drive its 
adversaries. For the moment we may well neglect 
all but those earnest spirits who were impelled, despite 
themselves, to one side or the other. These earnest 
spirits could discern only that they themselves were 
striving, with all their hearts, for the realization of 
noble ideals; that they were ready to give their all 
for the service of that God whose will must be done 



254 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

on earth as it is in heaven, in Church and in State alike. 
Whoever opposed them, the Cavaliers believed as 
profoundly as the Puritans, opposed the will of God; 
whoever opposes the will of God works the will of the 
Devil. 

And yet, now that the centuries are beginning to 
run their later course, we can perceive how beneath 
their deep and passionate misunderstanding, enhanced 
and intensified by every manner of outward accident, 
there glowed in the hearts of earnest men, on either 
side, a common and a noble aspiration. All alike 
believed that the times had waxed very evil; that 
right and rights were no longer in any manner of 
accord; that the working of human laws, whether in 
Church or in State, had reached a pass where divine 
law must remould them. Yet all alike were deeply 
imbued with that conservative instinct which is the 
vital strength of English blood; no one dreamed of 
wantonly neglecting the past of that English nation 
to which all meant to be loyal. Each side sincerely 
believed that it could rest its case securely on what 
the phrase of their day vaguely called the fundamental 
law of England. In turning to this fundamental law, 
the while, each side seems passionately to have for- 
gotten the fundamental fact which had made English 
law, and which makes it still, so admirably potent. 
Each alike appealed to fundamental law for precedents 
and principles which should confirm the authority by 
virtue of which each in its separate way desired at once 



PURITANISM 255 

honestly and arbitrarily, to change the course of his- 
tory. Neither side paused to consider what the course 
of history had actually been. 

Now the customs of men, as they embody them- 
selves in the laws under which, in any given age, 
human society can be governed, are deeply complex 
things, whose origin we must always seek in ancestral 
practice. Long forgotten though such ancestral 
practice be, and often distorted by use or disuse almost 
beyond recognition, it may no more be neglected by 
those who would beneficently direct public affairs, 
than the constitution of a patient may be, by a physi- 
cian who is trying to help or to cure him. The 
noblest reformer who attempts to make right control 
the world, by arbitrarily changing the customs and 
the ancestral rights of any society, is doomed to tragic 
disappointment. You may extirpate a race or a na- 
tion, but if you spare a drop of its blood, or a gleam 
of its spirit, you can control it only by intuitive or 
cunning recognition of its organism. The historic 
force which gives life to peoples must be continuous; 
new rights and customs must spring from the rights 
and customs of old. In moments of national passion, 
earnest men, believing with honest folly that they 
know what absolute right is, may succeed, for a while, 
in imposing some semblance thereof on the rights of 
those who for the moment chance to be their sub- 
jects. But as soon as their merely physical force 
begins to relax, the distorted stream of national life 



256 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

will swerve back, and its onrush will sweep the divine 
madmen away. 

So when, in that mid-seventeenth century, Cava- 
liers and Puritans alike appealed to the fundamental 
law of England, neither of them seem even to 
have suspected how the true strength of that 
law had resided in its power of flexibly adapting 
itself, as it adapts itself to-day, both in Eng- 
land and in our continental Union beyond the 
seas, to the slowly and surely changing needs and 
conditions of men. Each side fell into the error of 
believing that some manner of legislation — whether 
the decrees of King and Council, or the votes of a Par- 
liament which virtually expelled its own majority — 
could force their national history into a course different 
from that in which historic force was tending. Each 
fancied that it could supplant a system of legal rights 
— strong from its foundation in national life, from its 
adequacy to the needs of men, — by a new system 
which need find its sanction only in that eternal right 
which emanates from divinity. 

We have lingered so long over these generaliza- 
tions concerning the period which marks the diverg- 
ence of our national ways, English and American, 
that we have little time left for the more palpable 
realities of historic fact. We can hardly name even 
a few of the chief among them : Short Parliament and 
Long ; the Civil Wars ; the Westminster Assembly ; the 
execution of the King — crime if you will, almost cer- 



PURITANISM 257 

tainly a folly, but more certainly still an act of 
supreme devotion; the paralyzing wrangles of the 
Commonwealth; the tyranny of the Protectorate; 
the futile Instrument of Government; and whatever 
else came before the acquiescence of the Restoration. 
But by this time we can begin to understand what 
all this confusion came to signify among English- 
men. 

When the Civil Wars began, England was still in 
a state of such national youth that all men believed 
rights to be matters which could be controlled by a 
dominant assertion of right. Both sides attempted 
so to control them. The effort led only to a turbu- 
lence which seemed more and more destructive. So 
by and by came a despairing or a cynical pause. 
Whatever enthusiasts might assert in the name of 
right, practical men came to feel, rights were too 
precious for any further neglect. In rights lay the 
true safety of the nation; let right rave as it would, 
rights must be asserted and preserved. 

The form in which English rights have been subse- 
quently asserted and preserved, no doubt, has not been 
quite that in which they found themselves before the 
troubles. Revolutions are apt to end not in conquest 
but in compromise. So, speaking broadly as ever, we 
may agree that from the time when King Charles II. 
came back to his throne the actual sovereignty of Eng- 
land has tended more and more to reside in Parliament, 
which constitutionally expresses the will of the nation, 



258 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

while the form of sovereignty has been maintained 
by the King, whose actual power has slowly decreased 
with the passing of time. This compromise, this 
acknowledged separation of the fact of sovereignty 
from its semblance, has on the whole persisted from 
the Restoration to this day. And throughout that 
time the English nation, taught and alarmed by the 
terrible experience of those seventeenth century years, 
has dreaded, beyond all things else in public matters, 
the control of established order by abstract principle. 
In which mood — a mood, I believe, as evident in the 
reintegrating literary expression of the later seven- 
teenth century as it is in political history — we may 
definitely discern the characteristic which has chiefly 
made the national temper of England since the Com- 
monwealth a different, and a less youthful, thing than 
that national temper was before the Civil Wars. 

Now the fact, it seems to me, which has chiefly 
marked the difference between England and our 
New England, I might better say our whole 
America, across the seas, is the fact that no such 
change as this was ever forced, by historic circum- 
stance, on the pristine temper of the emigrant Puri- 
tans. There was never a temper much less tolerant 
than that which they implanted at first in their conti- 
nent of forest and wilderness. They cared as little 
for abstract liberty as Strafford cared, or Laud, or 
Charles himself. They dealt with Antinomians and 
Quakers as summarily as any tyranny ever dealt 



PURITANISM 259 

with rebellion. But, by a strange paradox, the 
conviction which they held thus intolerantly was 
a self-reliant conviction in which the germs of free- 
dom to come lay implicitly hidden. From the begin- 
ning they were strong and united in their Calvinistic 
faith that human rights must be controlled by that 
divine right which springs from no Kings or Bishops, 
but straight from the spirit of God Himself, as that 
spirit is imparted to the newly harmonized will of the 
saints. It was their fortune to be confronted, all in 
common, with the brute force of still unconquered 
Nature, and with the hovering presence of common 
enemies — French and Indian. From the beginning, 
therefore, their common tasks and dangers tended 
to strengthen their common faith by all the fel- 
lowship of common interests and common duties. 
So all the while that the course of history in 
England was changing and exacerbating the character 
of English Puritanism, the forces which were at work 
in New England were tending rather to preserve and 
to define the Puritanism of the elder time. 

Then by and by, as the fathers of New England 
sank to their rest, and their children came to dwell 
in their places, the ideals which the fathers had 
brought from their Elizabethan fatherland, where the 
presence of an historic past was so soon to prove them 
revolutionary, began to acquire across seas the ineffable 
sanction of reverenced tradition. And thus America 
came to cherish its own tradition, its own spiritual 



2 6o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

and historic continuity, which persists even to this 
day. The old Puritan paradox of ideality behind and 
above law is strong in America still, strengthened 
by three centuries of ancestral faith. The changes 
of the years have as yet done little more than to vary 
its aspect and its utterance; they have only just begun 
sadly to mature its youthful spirit. For it is only 
when a nation grows into all the dense and populous 
complexity of wealth and power that the wisdom of 
experience begins to force on men the lesson which 
England had to learn more than two hundred years 
ago : in this world of ours, if nations are to live, 
they must seek the right chiefly through the rights 
by which alone national life may be preserved. 

Long ago, of course, America had inevitably 
developed certain national customs which in truth 
amount to a system of rights peculiarly its own. In 
the unnoticed divergence of these from the rights 
which had existed or which were developed in 
England may be found the secret of the mutual mis- 
understandings which sundered us in the eighteenth 
century. When the New England Puritans made their 
way across the sea, all Puritans alike were agreed on 
hardly anything more definite than that rights must 
be sanctioned by right. In England, as we have seen, 
this conviction soon developed into a claim of Parlia- 
mentary sovereignty. To New England, such a claim 
was totally foreign. There, to be sure, they soon 
developed a system of self-government; but this sys- 



PURITANISM 261 

tern sprung from an endeavor, to use words attributed 
to John Cotton, "after a theocracy, as near as might 
be to that which was the glory of Israel." From 
this, in the end, arose something like a democratic 
tradition; but Americans never developed a tradi- 
tional sense that the Parliament of England was in 
any sense their rightful sovereign. Parliamentary 
sovereignty had been no part of the political creed 
held by the emigrant fathers; and when, in 1775, 
America rose in open rebellion against this sover- 
eignty, it was opposing a claim which, to its own tra- 
ditions, seemed as strangely revolutionary as the 
assertions of absolute Parliamentary power seemed 
to the adherents of King Charles I. Puritan though 
the ancestral temper of America was, it was never 
quite of the Parliamentary type. 

It is not long since an accomplished English student 
of history, examining for the first time the details of 
seventeenth century New England, remarked, as what 
surprised him most, that these Yankee Puritans seemed, 
throughout the century, almost Elizabethan still. At a 
glance, one could detect few men of the later type; 
Roger Williams perhaps, and John Wheelwright, who 
were exiled from Massachusetts ; Sir Henry Vane and 
Hugh Peters, who soon found their way back to the 
mother country. What was thus true of seventeenth 
century New England has remained true of America 
ever since. To this day the American vestiges of 
Puritan spirit are Elizabethan still — springing straight 



262 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

from the integral elder days which nurtured as well 
the imaginative masterpieces of poetry and of the 
drama. 

We have strayed far and long from literature. 
Yet if we keep in mind the reason why we agreed to 
consider literature together, we may feel ourselves 
justified. What we have been trying to discern, 
through literature, is the national temper of England, 
as revealed there during the century of its most con- 
spicuous recorded change. So at first we tried to 
define for ourselves the temper of English literature 
in the superb Elizabethan integrity with which the 
seventeenth century began. Then we traced the dis- 
integrating drama to its decline; then we traced the 
other kinds of poetry in their parallel course of 
luxuriant decadence; then we considered the more 
free course, the while, of lasting prose, not yet 
subject to the mastery of benumbing standards. 
And everywhere, in poetry and in prose alike, we 
found ourselves left, as it were, in a world apart. 
The various kinds of literature which had begun 
by expressing in common a sense of integral and 
passionate national life had passed into more widely 
separate forms which express, at their best, the 
experiences of individual solitude — now fervent, now 
contemplative, now only prettily fantastic. The ques- 
tion of whither the passion of the elder time had 
betaken itself was forced upon us. In answering it 
we could not avoid our attempt to define the aspects 



PURITANISM 263 

of English temper which inevitably ensued from the 
passionate growth of Puritan Calvinism. 

In fact, the fierce contests which arose from this 
growth absorbed the passionate energies of active 
men. You must seek the traces of them elsewhere 
than in literature — in sermons and the like, in pam- 
phlets of acrimonious controversy, in more grave and 
formal discussions of human rights and of divine right, 
in speeches, in letters, in the endless authorities con- 
cerning intrigue and warfare from which masters of 
historical wisdom and method are still trying to ex- 
tract the outline of the truth. Our business has not 
been to unbury, under pretence that they are litera- 
ture, the bewildering writings in which the men of 
those troublous times passionately recorded the facts, 
or attempted, each in his own way, to set forth the 
meaning of the passing moments. We have only been 
trying, by an imaginative effort of our own, to feel 
rather than to know what this clash of national discord 
was like. We have been trying to simplify the 
extremes of its emotion until we might begin sympa- 
thetically to understand the forces which for a while 
distracted England. 

In our effort to understand the spiritual environ- 
ment of men in that mid-century, we have at least 
found a reason why the chief note of literature during 
those days should have been a note of personal soli- 
tude. When the world is ablaze, only those can 
express themselves who stand aside. The histories 



264 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of these troublous times all tell us how the London 
tradesman Ferrers betook himself from the warring- 
world to the gentle retirement of Little Gidding, 
where — apart from the growing tumults, coming and 
to come — he worshipped God in the beauty of holi- 
ness, separating himself from all but willing disciples, 
in such temper as the Church of Rome rewards 
with canonization. It was partly Little Gidding which 
inspired the devout retirement to simple duties which 
crowned the life of George Herbert, and which 
breathes its serenity through the holy books his last 
years have left us. From the same sources sprang 
the ecstatic mysticism of the Anglican Vaughan, and 
the burning fervor which Crawshaw could quench 
only in the full flood of communion with Rome. The 
same years brought Thomas Browne, amid the simple 
duties of his unconsecrated activities, to the mood 
which gives lasting and gentle life to the earlier utter- 
ances of his prose. And Herrick, the while, in his 
Devonshire personage, was content to make his life 
pleasant, so long as the times would suffer, with those 
dainty verses which are still the most delicate flower 
sprung from the sturdy stock of Ben Jonson. 

There are other literary remains from these times 
on which we can hardly touch. During that half 
century Lord Herbert of Cherbury lived that life of 
the elder time so pleasantly recorded in his Auto- 
biography. To the same period belongs the life 
of Colonel Hutchinson, which shows how irre- 



PURITANISM 265 

sistibly a man who ardently loved the gentle graces 
of culture might find himself drawn by convic- 
tion to the side of the Puritans. In those same days 
Richard Baxter lived that life of humbler Puritanism 
which bore fruit in his "Saint's Rest" — a work of 
spiritual consolation not yet laid aside by the de- 
vout, and perhaps the most typical expression of 
the Puritan spirit we have been trying to define. 
To the same days, too, belong most of the lives 
later recorded by Izaak Walton in those biogra- 
phies which men who love letters will always love to 
read. From the same days as well came the copious 
religious verses of Wither, and those quaint common- 
places of Francis Quarles, and of other writers of 
emblems and the like, in which simple folk took such 
deep, prolonged satisfaction. We might long go on, 
adding name after name to the worthy list. 

And yet, when the last was added, one chief fact 
would still emerge, as that which we must surely 
remember. Above, beyond, beneath all else, the fact 
which awakened and absorbed national passion was 
the progress toward its temporary dominance of 
sombrely ecstatic Puritanism. And as Puritanism 
grew insistent in its assertions, there was forced 
upon it, with the struggle for earthly, Parliamentary 
sovereignty, a sore experience, which exacerbated 
its temper and its expression in every form. From 
this exacerbation, New England, as we have seen, 
was spared. But in England, the typical Puritans 



266 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



of the mid-seventeenth century had come to differ 
from the Puritans of Elizabethan times. 

It is a happy chance that among these mid-cen- 
tury English Puritans may be counted the one man 
of that period who is incontestably great in literature. 
This, of course, is Milton. Like all great men, he 
was not only great, but he was a man of his 
time as well. In turning to him now, we may accord- 
ingly find justification for these preliminary consider- 
ations of what came before him and of what sur- 
rounded him. For they may perhaps help us to 
understand him a little better than of old ; and, at the 
same time, our consideration of him may perhaps help 
us to understand a little better than of old the aspects 
of national temper which we are trying to define 
together. 



X 

MILTON BEFORE THE CIVIL WARS 

It is a commonplace that Milton's career naturally 
divides itself into three parts: his early years, when 
he was preparing himself for his life-work; the mid- 
period of his life when — almost forsaking poetry — 
he threw himself passionately into politics and the 
like, and by prose writings endeavored to influence 
and to mould public opinion; and the sad retirement 
of his blind later solitude, when he produced the 
great epic and the formal drama in which he summed 
up, as best he might, the truths which experience 
had taught him. To each of these periods we shall 
attend in turn; but we shall dwell chiefly on the first. 

The facts of his life need not detain us long; they 
are accessible in any books of reference. He was 
born, in the heart of London, in the year 1608. His 
father, the son of an Elizabethan Catholic, had be- 
come deeply Puritan in conviction ; but seems to have 
found no antagonism between Puritanism and cult- 
ure, and was particularly devoted to the art of music. 

The son, a child of remarkably delicate beauty, in- 

267 



268 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

herited both the seriousness of temper which underlay 
his father's Puritanism and the delight in beauty 
which underlay his father's culture. He was a great 
lover of books from infancy; and when he went to 
school he seems occasionally to have been impatient, 
not because he was expected to work, but because 
he already knew more than many of his pedantic 
masters. From school he went to Christ's College, 
Cambridge, where he remained seven years. For 
the next six years or so he lived with his father, 
who had retired to the Buckinghamshire country. 
Throughout these years, both of study and of retire- 
ment, he was faithful to his serious purpose that he 
should be a poet, and that to be a true poet he must make 
his life a true poem. During these years he produced 
the few but admirable masterpieces which are com- 
monly described as his early works. Then, for a year 
or more, he went abroad, chiefly to Italy, where he 
was cordially received, as an Englishman of con- 
spicuous culture, by the literary society of the time — 
a society now remembered outside of Italy mostly 
because it was so civil to Milton. Then, probably 
stirred by news of the increasing public troubles at 
home, he returned to England, and settled for a while 
in London, where he took his nephews as pupils, and 
sundry others. And here — an accomplished and 
scholarly tutor, who had published a few stray poems 
and had written a few more — we shall leave him for 
a while, at about the year 1640. 






MILTON 269 

Throughout these years he had shown marked 
personal characteristics. The tradition that his Cam- 
bridge nickname was the "Lady of Christ's," pre- 
serves memory not only of his delicate, almost femi- 
nine youthful beauty, but also of his moral fastidious- 
ness. His traditional Puritanism apparently took 
the form of a personal purity, at once instinctive and 
deliberate, such as was more conspicuous in the early 
seventeenth century than it might have been at some 
more sober and restrained period. The sense of duty 
inseparable from his Puritanism impelled him the 
while to an unusual degree of formal scholarship; 
and filled him with conviction that if he were to follow 
the traditionally consecrated vocation of poet, he 
must consecrate himself to his purpose. 

Most of his letters preserved from this period are in 
Latin, many of them in Latin verse. In one epistolary 
elegy which he wrote at twenty-one or thereabouts, he 
touches specifically on this opinion. Poets who are to 
sing of trivial matters — of love and the beauties of pass- 
ing life, — he says, may inspire themselves with earthly 
stimulant — with wine and the graces of laughing girls. 
But he who would tell "of wars and of Heaven, . . . 
of pious heroes, and leaders half-divine, . . . must 
live sparely, after the manner of Pythagoras, the 
Samian teacher. 1 . . . His youth must be chaste and 
void of offence; his manners strict, his hands without 

1 Ille quidem parce, Samii pro more magistri, 
Vivat. 



270 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

stain. 1 . . . For the bard is sacred to the gods ; he 
is their priest; mysteriously from his lips and his 
breast he breathes Jove." 2 This came some twenty 
years before his more mature assertion of the same 
principles in English : "He who would not be 
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in 
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem, 
. . . not presuming to sing high praises of 
heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself 
the experience and practice of all that which is praise- 
worthy." 

In these familiar passages you can feel, better per- 
haps than in more recondite ones, the temper of Milton's 
earlier days. Though his Puritanism had all the ear- 
nestness imaginable, it was not quickly stirred to the 
point of acrimony and controversy. And his methods 
of expression were far from such austere disdain of 
earthly beauties as made conventional Puritans gro- 
tesque. Every line of his Latin, brimming with the 
allusions and mannerisms of youthful classical lore, 
not yet hardened into pedantry, bespeaks a degree of 
formal culture which normally careless youths are apt 
to think priggish. What saves it is your conviction 
that it is not affected, but genuine; and that this 
genuineness involves a really loving care for austerely 
luxuriant beauty of form. 

1 Additur huic scelerisque vacuus et casta juventus 

Et rigidi mores, et sine labe manus. 
* Diis etenim sacer est vates, divumque sacerdos, 

Spirat et occultum pectus et ora Jovem. 



MILTON 271 

Such a nature, with such surrounding and such 
deliberate purpose, was bound to be deeply influenced 
by the learning and the literature which surrounded 
it. To understand the earlier poems of Milton, we 
must accordingly glance at their historic environment 
— at the learning and the literature which suffused the 
air he breathed. 

When we last touched on English learning, we 
were concerned mostly with Bacon and with Bur- 
ton — born Elizabethans, men of the elder generation. 
In their youth, the Renaissance had not lost the vigor 
of freshness; when Milton's time came, learning had 
begun to pass into the rigidity of traditional culture. 
Yet the classics were still far from the condition 
which makes them seem so futile to many modern 
minds. They had been mustered, and duly enrolled 
in their stately companies; these companies had not 
yet stiffened again into the marble rigidity of their 
second death. To earnest students the languages of 
antiquity were still presented not as curious objects 
for scientific investigation, but as vehicles in which 
the men of ancient times had made utterances eternally 
significant to those elect who could be received into 
communion with the spirit of learning. A scholar 
nowadays, at least in America, is often content when 
he is sure of his grammar and his archaeology; the 
elder scholarship held rather that its first business 
was to know, somewhat as we know living men, 
those greater fellow-beings of the past whose utter- 



272 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ances have become immortal. The more of them 
whom you thus knew, the more to whom you could 
easily and surely allude, the wiser and better man 
you would be. 

To master such allusions, meanwhile, and to as- 
similate the spirit of the ancients, there was no 
other means so sure as conscientious imitation of 
their utterance. Amid the confusion of modern 
tongues, the diuturnity of the ancient languages 
afforded a constant vehicle in which, even though 
man might not quite speak to man, learning could 
forever discourse to learning. So, by Milton's time, 
there had arisen, as a definite custom, that pleasant 
scholarly practice of attempting to express the facts 
of modern life in the terms of antiquity. Milton 
seems to have taken eagerly to this accomplishment. 
You shall seek far for more typical examples of it 
than you may find in the Latin letters and the Latin 
verses of his earlier years. He accepted the conven- 
tions of his time, but he did not let them master him; 
he had the force to make some gleam of his individu- 
ality shine, now and again, through the formal phrases 
of his academic Latin. 

On what he drew from modern literatures, we have 
even less time to touch. It is enough to say that 
among modern literatures the earliest, and so in his 
time the most deeply respectable, was the Italian; 
and that he was able, when he journeyed in Italy, 
to make Italian sonnets which proved acceptable to 



MILTON 273 

the Italian taste of the moment. What concerns us 
more deeply is the state in which English literature 
found itself during his youthful years. 

He was born, we have seen, in 1608. That 
was the year when Shakspere probably came to the 
end of his tragic period, and, with the imi- 
tativeness which never forsook him, was about 
to follow the newly popular manner of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. Spenser had been dead nine 
years; Ben Jonson was at the height of his influence; 
and Donne had turned from verse-making to the 
pulpit. Of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century 
prose at which we glanced, none was yet published; 
but the Authorized Version of the Bible, and Bacon's 
"Essays," 1 and Ralegh's "History" were approach- 
ing completion. In brief, when Milton was born the 
true Elizabethan literature was complete, and the 
tendencies which marked the later course of litera- 
ture in England were beginning to declare them- 
selves; but not even the drama had reached a stage 
of disintegration which should naturally impress a 
contemporary as a certain decline. 

The world was moving fast, though. In 1625, 
the year when Milton went to Cambridge, Bacon 
published his essays in their final form; and 
during the seven years of Milton's university 
life, every tendency which we have hitherto traced 

1 In the second edition, of course ; the first is so slight as to be virtu- 
ally an experimental overture to the final work. 



274 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

in English literature was fully developed. In those 
years the principal dramatists were Massinger, 
Ford, and Shirley; the chief Spenserian poets at 
whom we glanced had done most of their work; 
the Sons of Ben were at the height of their gay 
obedience; the conceits of Donne were penetrating 
everywhere; and probably the most popular work of 
contemporary literature was Burton's "Anatomy of 
Melancholy." We need trouble ourselves for the 
moment with no more retrospect. We must turn our 
attention now to the manner in which Milton, whose 
learning had shown itself so willing to obey the forms 
of conventional culture, seems to have been affected 
by the conventions of English literature during his 
earlier years. 

It is evidence of Milton's precocity that one of his 
works, which is widely familiar among people who 
never suspect that he wrote it, was produced when 
he was no more than fifteen years old. This is the 
metrical version of the One Hundred and Thirty-Sixth 
Psalm, beginning: 

Let us, with a gladsome mind, 
Praise the Lord, for he is kind: 

For his mercies aye endure, 

Ever faithful, ever sure. 

The lines have lingered in hymn-books to this day. 
Whoever has been brought up in regions of psalm- 
singing knows them by heart, and thinks of them, 



MILTON 275 

with what edification or rebellion may accompany 
such association, as one of the chants in which con- 
gregations are invited to join. Students of Milton, 
on the other hand, who have critically studied the. 
lines, find in them "rhymes, images, and turns of ex- 
pression" which demonstrate some knowledge on his 
part of a number of English poets — among them 
Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, Drummond, and above 
all Sylvester, whose ponderous translation of Du 
Bartas, a French Calvinistic poet, was among the • 
favorite books of English Puritans throughout Mil- 
ton's youth. What, on the whole, seems more 
remarkable than these traces of its origin are that the 
version, though the work of a mere boy, has such 
simplicity and such certainty of touch as to make it, 
on the whole, rather more lastingly effective than the 
various passages to which this or that phrase of it 
has been traced. In the fact that, so early in life, 
Milton could absorb the influences which affected 
him, making them his own, there is something char- 
acteristic. On the other hand, as anyone may see, 
this psalm is by no means Miltonic in effect. 

Not particularly Miltonic, either, is the first of the 
surviving English poems which he wrote at Cam- 
bridge — the lines "On the Death of a Fair Infant 
Dying of A Cough." They have Miltonic qualities, 
no doubt — completeness of conception, deliberation, 
seriousness, elaborate classical allusions; but, as was 
the case with the familiar psalm of a year or two 



276 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

before, these qualities are not instantly salient. You 
feel in the lines rather, on the one hand, the met- 
rical and formal influence of Spenser, and on the 
other hand an elaboration of overstrained metaphor 
wherein Donne, though not exactly imitated, is clean 
outdone. The nature of the astonishing conceit by 
which the pulmonary attack of the deceased baby is 
figured, as well as the Spenserian tone of the whole 
thing, appears in the first stanza: 

O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted, 

Soft silken Primrose fading timelessly, 
Summer's chief honour, if thou hadst outlasted 

Bleak Winter's force that made thy blossom dry; 

For he, being amorous on that lovely dye 
That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss, 
But killed, alas! and then bewailed his fatal bliss. 

Far more Milton's own is the first of the poems which 
have won him his true place in literature. This is the 
ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," made 
when he was only twenty-one years old. In the same 
Latin epistle to his half-Italian friend in which he 
sets forth his conception of how a poet should govern 
every vagary of youth, he tells how this impulse came 
to him on Christmas morning, 1629; 1 and of all the 
poems he has left us this seems, on the whole, the 
most spontaneous. There is plenty of Spenserian 
rhythm, and allegory, of course: the poem might be 

1 Dona quidem dedimus Christi natalibus ilia ; 
Ilia sub auroram lux mihi prima tulit. 



MILTON 277 

called the masterpiece of seventeenth century Spen- 
serianism. There are elaborate "metaphysical" con- 
ceits, too, such as that of the second stanza in the 
hymn, where Nature, who has been wantonly mis- 
behaving in the first, is sobered by the approaching 
birth of our Lord, wherefore — 

With speeches fair 

She woos the gentle air, 
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, 

And on her naked shame, 

Pollute with sinful blame, 
The saintly veil of maiden white to throw. 

No imagery could be much more decadent. Such 
lines as these, like the lines in which elderly and amor- 
ous Winter, two or three years before, proceeded to 
ravish a pretty baby girl, belong, in spirit, to the 
days when the drama was rotting to death. And yet, 
taken as a whole, this great ode does not seem deca- 
dent, nor yet imitative. You can feel it, when you 
stop to study and to analyze, a work of its own later 
time, when Davenant was publishing, and Massinger, 
and Francis Quarles; but if you will surrender your- 
self to the mere delight of reading, you will be swept 
along with such surge as Milton's final achievement 
proved peculiarly his own. Yet here this surge has a 
spontaneity, a freshness which still reminds you that he 
was almost Elizabethan. 

Take the stanza where he tells how the pagan gods 



278 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

were smitten with fright when the incarnation of the 
true God irradiated earth : 

Peor and Baalim 
Forsake their temples dim, 
With that twice-battered god of Palestine; 
And mooned Ashtaroth, 
Heaven's Queen and Mother both, 
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shrine: 
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn; 
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. 

Spenserian, if you choose to look backward, these 
lines, more certainly still, are fully Miltonic in their 
promise. It has been said that a poet is never so 
surely himself as when, apart from all allusion, from 
all positive meaning, he abandons himself to delight 
in the lyric use of proper names. And here you can 
feel, if you will, that same magic use of proper names 
which grandly pervades so many passages of "Para- 
dise Lost." One might linger long over this great 
ode. It is noteworthy for us as showing how, even 
in youth, Milton, who could not help being a man 
of his time, could suffuse the conventions from which 
he was to break with his own assertive and titanic 
individuality. 

And yet he could not do so at will. This Christmas 
Ode seems more than usually spontaneous. With a 
deliberation more characteristic than spontaneity ever 
was, he tried, toward Easter, to make a companion 
poem concerning the Passion. He gave it up, as his 



MILTON 279 

note at the close of the fragment says, because he 
found the subject "above the years he had when he 
wrote it." But though we may share his dissatisfac- 
tion, and be glad that his eighth stanza proved his 
last, we need not accept his reason. The real trouble 
was that, writing laboriously, he wrote in the full 
conceit of his decadent time; and so wrote, as a matter 
of taste, abominably: for example, 

Or, should I thence, hurried on viewless wing, 
Take up a weeping on the mountains wild, 

The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring 
Would soon unbosom all their Echoes mild; 
And I (for grief is easily beguiled) 

Might think the infection of my sorrows loud 

Had got a race of mourners on some pregnant cloud. 

No wonder, a year or so later, on his twenty-third 
birthday, he could honestly write, in lines as simple 
as they are grave, and consequently individual: 

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year ; 
My hasting days fly on with full career, 

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. 

It was about two years later, when he was living 
quietly at Horton, that he produced his first thorough 
masterpieces, "L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso." In 
these, as much as in anything he ever wrote, one 
feels him absolutely himself. His gravity of purpose 
pervades them, with all its underlying Puritan earnest- 



2 8o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

ness; his culture pervades them too, with less ped- 
antry than usual; and his delight in pure beauty 
— in those aspects of this world which are at 
once innocent and pregnant with joy — is at its 
height. So is the deliberation which blends these 
qualities in lines we may fairly call faultless. There 
is much less trace of Spenser than in the poems 
he made at Cambridge; there is very little trace of 
such over-ingenious conceit as sprung from the influ- 
ence of Donne. Though, like all his work, these 
poems are far from what we now call humor, there 
is beneath them a dominant sense of humor, which 
saves them from absurdity and from faults of taste. 
The students tell us that he was probably stirred to 
choice of his subjects by some lines in Burton's 
"Anatomy of Melancholy" — a book which he is known 
to have read by this time. They tell us, too, that 
there are songs in Beaumont and Fletcher, probably 
earlier than these lines of Milton, and yet so like them 
that we can hardly hold the likeness accidental. They 
point out, as well, that the final couplet of both 
"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" is clearly reminis- 
cent of Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my 
love." Yet there might be room, all the while, for an 
opinion which should maintain that just as the "Ode 
on Christ's Nativity" shows the individuality of Mil- 
ton breaking through the contemporary conventions 
which were stiffening into rigidity the manners of 
Spenser and of Donne, so — more remotely — "L'Alle- 



MILTON 281 

gro" and "II Penseroso" show how this same indi- 
viduality of Milton's could pervade, and alter, and 
absorb into a form which finally seems almost inde- 
pendent the contemporary conventions which, at the 
same time, were imposing on so wide a range of Eng- 
lish poetry the principles asserted and practised by 
Jonson. 

It is not that these poems imitate Jonson, nor 
yet that anyone could quite mistake them for con- 
ventional utterances from the tribe of Ben. It is 
rather that the chaste precision of their form has an 
underlying, as distinguished from a superficial or ob- 
trusive, classical spirit such as makes excellent the 
assimilated classicism of Jonson himself. At least, it 
is hardly fantastic to suggest that by this time Mil- 
ton, the great poet of the mid-century, had shown 
himself accessible to all the influences in contemporary 
English poetry; and had proved himself able to mas- 
ter those influences, instead of being mastered by 
them. 

In the next works which proceeded from him at 
Horton, he appears in a totally different character. 
So far, except for the pleasant allusions to the stage 
in its nobler aspect which occur in "U Allegro" and 
"II Penseroso," and for some conventional lines among 
others prefixed to the second folio of Shakspere, 
Milton had shown little interest in dramatic poetry. 
Nothing, indeed, could have been more remote from 
the license and disrepute of the theatre than his Puri- 



282 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tan and scholarly life. He came of precisely that 
social class — neither high enough to patronize the 
stage nor low enough to be indifferent to conven- 
tional respectability — which can concern itself with 
theatrical affairs only at the expense of its self- 
respect. But there had arisen, by this time, a spe- 
cific kind of dramatic writing which was at once 
practicable, in the sense that it was made to be acted, 
and as impeccably respectable as any closet-drama fash- 
ioned on Seneca or on the Greeks. This was the 
masque — a kind of thing now virtually extinct, or 
rather, perhaps, now developed into the full profes- 
sional conventions of opera and ballet. 

Italian in origin, the masques were essentially 
elaborate spectacles, with every device of decoration, 
of costume, of music, of dancing and the like, which 
the resources of the time would allow. They were 
apt to be performed not by professional actors, 
but by courtiers or by other persons of condition 
who amused themselves in this elaborate and, in every 
sense, extravagant fashion. From time to time, pro- 
fessional dramatists were called on to produce the 
words and the plots for masques, generally alle- 
gorical in substance, which were to be performed 
at court or elsewhere. The dramatic literature of 
the early seventeenth century is full of them. They 
are generally as dull to read as the texts of old- 
fashioned Italian operas; but they are dull reading 
of a period when lyric poetry was still alive; and from 



MILTON 283 

amid their tedious and trivial conventions, which 
needed, for enlivenment, all the accessories of their 
elaborate presentation, you can cull songs enough 
to make the search for them pleasant. And now and 
then this kind of writing emerged into a pretty, arti- 
ficial excellence. 

Some critics are inclined to class with masques, 
or at least to describe as hybrids between masques 
and regular plays, the exquisitely fantastic beauties of 
Shakspere's "Midsummer Night's Dream" and of his 
"Tempest." It were better to point to the interlude 
of Pyramus and Thisbe, in the former, as an example 
of the native convention which allied itself with the 
Italian to produce the full English masque of Stuart 
times; and to indicate the formal little masque with 
which Prospero entertains his friends in the "Tem- 
pest" as an example of what this kind of thing was 
like about 161 2. Of the masques by the regular play- 
wrights which have survived those which retain most 
vitality and beauty are perhaps the "Sun's Darling," 
attributed to Dekker and Ford; Ben Jonson's "Sad 
Shepherd"; and the "Faithful Shepherdess," of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. If you will surrender yourself 
to the spirit of these, you may find in them still 
not only lyric delight, but the kind of pleasure said 
to be attainable even to-day by people who can make 
themselves accept the allegories of a ballet or a panto- 
mime. 

In the days when Ben Jonson was laureate, he 



284 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

made masque after masque for performance at court ; 
and the scenic effects were contrived by Inigo Jones; 
and the greatest personages did not disdain to take 
parts in the pageant; and what it all cost, heaven 
knows. At all events, this kind of frivolity was pecul- 
iarly repugnant to the less cultivated Puritans, who 
found in it special evidence that depravity was actually 
saturating the great world from which they were com- 
pletely shut out. 

When Prynne's "Histriomastix" appeared, in 1633, 
a passage which, with a virulence excessive even 
for him, denounced female actors was taken as an 
allusion to the recent appearance of the Queen, Henri- 
etta Maria, in some court masque. It was this 
passage in particular which brought Prynne accord- 
ingly to the pillory; and the publicity of Prynne's 
crime and punishment was what stirred the Inns of 
Court to entertain royalty with the most elaborate 
and costly masque as yet seen in England. The 
same impulse seems to have stimulated a general 
demand for this kind of writing. To the fact 
that Lawes, a musician known to be among 
Milton's friends, desired words for some masque- 
music we probably owe the fragments of a masque 
by Milton which are called "Arcades" — elaborate 
little songs and a long rhymed speech in honor of the 
old Countess of Derby. To the same cause which 
produced these we certainly owe the elaborate masque 
"Comus," made immediately afterwards; the three 



MILTON 285 

principal parts in it were written for performance by 
three of this venerable lady's young grandchildren. 

The first fact which "Comus" demonstrates con- 
cerning^ Milton is that, whatever he was, he was no 
dramatist. "Samson Agonistes," his only other work 
in dramatic form, was never intended for performance, 
and may fairly be judged on its noble merits as a 
poem. But "Comus" was made for acting. And if 
by chance you are ever exposed to the opportunity 
of witnessing an academic revival of it — we have had 
an admirable one, within a few years, in America — 
you should shun the temptation, unless you chance 
to be curious as to the depths of tediousness which 
can be compressed into an hour. An old-fashioned 
Calvinistic sermon is gay in comparison; and the 
motive of "Comus" is one which might most fitly 
assume the form of homiletic eloquence. Plays, doubt- 
less, can teach and preach, and stir you still. The 
trouble with "Comus" is that from beginning to end 
its only dramatic phase is that its lines are placed in 
the mouth now of one lifeless personage and again of 
another. Nothing happens — as was apt, indeed, to be 
the case with masques, anyway ; there is hardly a sug- 
gestion of individual character ; and the speeches drag 
on their sonorous length until each in turn suggests 
some drearily fresh conception of unblest eternity. 

And yet, for all this, "Comus" is a noble poem. 
The conventional masques, after the corrupt fashion 
of the time, were apt, like the sentimental plays of 



286 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the decadent dramatists, to celebrate the virtue of 
a merely physical chastity. Frankly accepting this 
conventional motive, and unwittingly admitting him- 
self by the acceptance a poet of the dramatic deca- 
dence, Milton, with all his Puritan solemnity of 
temper, turned the mummeries of conventional alle- 
gory into an assertion that chastity, to be potent, 
must be a purity not of the flesh, but of the spirit. And 
bringing to his labors the elevated conscientiousness 
of his cultured cult of noble poetry, he made his 
appallingly dull play a nobly sustained and complete 
poem. If we cannot listen to its performance without 
despair, we cannot read the lines of it without that 
sense of deep and wondering admiration which Mil- 
ton alone of deliberate English poets can kindle into 
some semblance of enthusiasm. 

This "Comus" is not only, what the conventional 
masques hardly ever were, an almost classically com- 
plete composition in form. It is sustained through- 
out by classical unity of serious spirit, transmuting 
the frank paganism of Renaissance tradition into a 
depth of moral meaning wherein no trace of paganism 
lingers save in abundance of classical allusion. 
Throughout its lyric passages, the kind of solemn 
music which animates every line of "L' Allegro" and 
"II Penseroso" vibrates with all its stately power. 
And in the blank verse which the nominal personages 
so volubly roll forth, we hear at last the deep notes 
of that Miltonic grandeur which was to make the 



MILTON 287 

diction of "Paradise Lost" a new revelation of what 
English verse could be. 

These noble merits, all Milton's own, have brought 
their reward. Turning himself deliberately to dra- 
matic poetry, — the species which, at a time just before 
his, had normally grown to highest excellence, — he im- 
pregnated it, just as he had impregnated the lyric tra- 
ditions of Spenser, of Jonson and of Donne, with a seri- 
ous grandeur of spirit all his own. He proved himself 
masterly, as Shakspere had proved himself masterly 
a generation before. Here was a poet who could not 
touch the work of others without leaving on it his 
own noble impress. More limited in sympathetic 
insight than Shakspere, or than the least of the drama- 
tists, he could not make this impress other than that 
of his own obvious individuality; but, as we have 
seen, solitary individuality was growing to be typical, 
throughout literature, of the days through which he 
was living. So he made, in "Comus," the least divert- 
ing masque in English literature ; and made, the while, 
the one English poem, in masque form, which took at 
once and forever a permanent place in the great 
poetry of the modern world. 

Something similar is true of the other and the last 
poem which has surely survived from these earlier 
days. His masterpiece some are disposed to call 
"Lycidas"; and no comment on it would be tolerable 
which should distract us from its consummate dig- 
nity and beauty. Yet in its historical relation 



288 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

to Milton's former poems, and to the literature 
which had affected these, it may prove, apart 
from its own lyric perfection, a matter of fresh 
interest and of suggestion. The occasion of it is 
familiar. A young man whom Milton had known at 
Cambridge, and who was destined for the Church, — 
a man who, in some intangible but unmistakable way, 
seems to have impressed whoever knew him as prom- 
ising, — was accidentally drowned on his way home 
from Ireland. A volume of memorial verse, mostly 
in conventional Latin, was presently collected in his 
honor. To this collection Milton, who had apparently 
written no extant poetry since "Comus," contributed 
the pastoral elegy which alone makes the volume, or 
the youth it celebrated, lastingly memorable. 

It has been urged by sympathetic critics that the 
pastoral conventions here so frankly accepted were 
welcome to Milton — just as they had been welcome 
to Spenser before him, and were welcome to Shelley 
in later days — because they permit a poet to wander 
in a region of pure, unmixed ideals, where the flights 
and the impulses of his imagination need never be 
checked by any such benumbing and controlling 
sense of fact as must perforce affect all literal state- 
ments, or indeed all dramatic or epic poetry which 
deals with actual human beings. And inasmuch as 
those who, recognizing the artificiality of pastoral 
poetry, thus assert its virtue, are apt to be themselves 
of poetic temper, it is perhaps rash to suppose them 



MILTON 289 

in any wise mistaken. Very surely, too, the fact that 
pastoral conventions, in varying forms, have so long 
and so widely persisted means that, despite their arti- 
ficiality, they must at once express and appeal to 
emotions widely diffused among human beings. 
Admitting all this, it is equally true that even the 
pastoral poetry of the Greeks seems an intentional, 
conscious conventionalizing of nature into dainty 
prettiness; that the Latin pastorals seem deliberately 
conventional imitations of Greek prettiness, admired 
because it proceeded from the source of civilization; 
and that the Renaissance pastorals of Continental 
Europe bear to the Latin much such relation as the 
Latin bear to the Greek. By Milton's time, it has 
been remarked, the English imitators of Continental 
pastorals — particularly Spenser and Browne — had 
introduced into this extremely artificial kind of writ- 
ing pretty touches from actual nature, which brought 
the English pastoral somewhat nearer to life than any 
other since the original Greek. And there are sun- 
dry sympathetic discussions of what "must have been" 
the conscious motive of Spenser in choosing to cele- 
brate Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Ralegh in the 
guise of Dresden china shepherds. 

What "must have been" the case with any man 
whose motives are unrecorded is a convincing state- 
ment only when you are disposed to agree. All 
we can surely assert concerning Spenser is that he 
was a conscientious experimenter, who found our Eng- 



290 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

lish still untamed to such service as the conditions of 
civilized literature demand, and who strove deliberately 
to discover the civilized forms to which he could per- 
manently tame it. His formal success was amazing. 
Beginning with almost blind experiments in classical 
metres and the like, he ended by adapting from the 
Italian that wonderful stanza which is so surely his 
own that one thinks of it rather as a creation than 
as an adaptation. So, long before the end, — even in' 
many passages from the "Shepherd's Calendar," — 
Spenser's style, the detail of his poetry, rose to such 
positive beauty that one is constantly tempted to for- 
get the old-world archaism of the thoughts it sets 
forth. Yet, as one grows familiar with Spenser, none 
of his traits grows more certain than what has been 
called the pre-Quixotic vagary of his romantic inven- 
tion and fantasy. He wrote the language of the 
immortals; but he clothed in it not so much immortal 
creations of imagination as ingeniously fantastic vari- 
ations of conventions which appealed to his time — 
and so far as one can tell to him among the men 
of his time — chiefly because they came from regions 
more civilized than Elizabethan poets found their 
native ones. In other words, the pastoral conventions 
seem to have been welcome to Spenser for the same 
reason which made Greek pastorals admirable to the 
Romans of the Empire — because they were the fash- 
ion among people whom he wished to imitate and to 
emulate. 



MILTON 291 

Milton's frank acceptance of pastoral convention 
in "Lycidas" indicates something similar. In the 
Latin letters of his youthful days, in the Latin elegies 
which he made at Cambridge and later printed, in 
almost every record of his early studies and expres- 
sions, there is trace of his personality ; and those who 
seek in them chiefly the Milton who was to be will 
doubtless find him. But those who should approach 
the same records unprejudiced would be apt to find 
in them little more than astonishingly thorough ex- 
amples of how a studious youth, saturated with the 
scholarship which in Milton's day was orthodox, could, 
with all the ardor of what he deemed sincerity, expend 
endless energy in assimilating himself to utterly unreal 
conventions. An English youth expressing himself in 
the terms, and striving to express himself in the mood, 
not of England but of civilized antiquity, is after all 
a masquer. That he does not know himself for one 
does not change the fact. It only marks him either 
as lacking humor — as Milton lacked it, and Shelley, 
too ; or else as of a period, like that of Spenser, when 
the art he practised is not yet so fully developed that 
the saving grace of humor can sweeten and human- 
ize it. 

Now the pastoral conventions of "Lycidas" may 
surely be held dear to Milton because of the freedom 
they gave him to muster in a single poem images and 
fancies from the whole range of his learning, his specu- 
lation, and his culture. But it may equally be main- 



292 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tained that there is no reason for so abstruse an 
explanation of them. Milton, we have seen, was a 
poet in whose conscientious and deliberate work one 
can find trace after trace of the poets who preceded 
him — of the old Puritan Sylvester, of Spenser, of 
Jonson, of Donne, and even of Beaumont and 
Fletcher and of Marlowe — of the makers not only 
of lyrics and epics, but of court masques. When he 
had written before, he had seemingly chosen his form, 
as anyone else would choose it, because the form was 
recognized. And thus, at least we may suppose, he 
chose a pastoral form for his elegy because in his time 
that form was regular. 

This does not mean that he left the form where he 
found it. We have seen enough of him already to 
understand how from the beginning he was of those 
poets who, in adopting the conventions of other men, 
impress on them their own individuality. And by the 
time of "Lycidas," the individuality of Milton had 
grown more austere. The mood even of "Comus" is 
more severe than that of "L' Allegro" and "II Penser- 
oso." In "Lycidas" his Puritan severity has deepened 
until his final utterance of it rises to the height of 
deliberate prophecy: 

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 
Enow of such as for their bellies'' sake 
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! 
Of other care they little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
And shove away the worthy bidden guest! 



MILTON 293 

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheephook, or have learn'd aught else the least 

That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! 

What recks it then? What need they? They are sped 

And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed; 

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing sed; 

But that two-handed engine at the door 

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. 

History was moving fast in those days; and Laud's 
efforts to enforce conformity were concentrating the 
Puritan spirit in a conscious antagonism more and 
more burning. These were just the years, too, when 
New England was founding. When Milton went to 
Cambridge, the only settlement in New England was 
that at Plymouth; when "Lycidas" was published, 
there were already undergraduates at Harvard Col- 
lege. The period during which we have been follow- 
ing his development was precisely that when the tra- 
ditions of New England parted from those of the 
mother country. And Milton does not burst forth 
into the full austerity of his Puritanic denunciation 
till this "Lycidas" of 1638. Here he shows himself 
no longer Elizabethan, but stirred by the Puritanism 
of the years to come — the militant Puritanism of the 
seventeenth century. And thus, by the individuality 



294 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which broke through the confines of accepted pastoral 
convention, he made of "Lycidas" what he had made 
of "Comus," three or four years before. It is at once 
an example of a literary type accidentally popular in 
his time, always artificial, now outworn; and the ex- 
pression of a poetic individuality so dominant and 
so assertive, in its strange combination of Renaissance 
culture with Puritan austerity, that even the substance 
of this poem would give it lasting place in literature. 
When we add to this the magical beauties of its verse, 
we can see why, again and again, men forget its archa- 
isms of conception and fashion, seeing in it only — 
what it surely is — an immortal masterpiece. 

At the same time, this masterpiece, — like "Comus," 
and like "L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso,"— full though 
it be of Elizabethan influence, is no longer a poem 
which anyone could guess to be of the true Elizabethan 
period. The note of that elder day, as we have so 
often reminded ourselves, was a note of national 
integrity. In whatever ways Elizabethan Englishmen 
expressed themselves, you can always feel that they 
were intelligible to another; one and all seem, as 
we regard them in the perspective of time, contem- 
poraries and fellow-countrymen. As we followed 
the course of seventeenth century literature in its 
various streams toward and beyond the time to which 
we have now followed the career of Milton, we 
remarked, as perhaps its most characteristic trait, 
that the men who expressed themselves in lasting 



MILTON 295 

English seemed more and more solitary. Compare 
Shirley with Shakspere, Herrick with Ben Jonson, 
Sir Thomas Browne with Bacon, and you will feel 
the fact now in question. Whatever the merits or 
the powers of the later generation, it had distinct 
limits. Each man, in those later days, seems no 
longer to address the whole body of his countrymen; 
he speaks only to those who are disposed to listen. 
Nor does he always seem much to care whether many 
listen or not. 

In the case of Milton, this kind of personal soli- 
tude, so generally characteristic of his contemporaries, 
appears with extreme distinctness. It is not quite 
the result either of his origin or of his native 
temper. A generation earlier, and a generation later, 
you can imagine, — in times when English litera- 
ture was still integral, or in times when it tended 
to reintegration, — this Milton, with his purity of 
purpose, with his mingled austerity and culture, need 
not have sat apart or stood alone. The willing- 
ness with which he adapted himself, in his Latin 
writings and his English alike, to forms of expression 
which were recognized as excellent would prove him 
by the width of heaven apart from those eccentrics 
of decadent literature and art who can be what they 
deem their true selves only when they deliberately 
avoid resembling anyone else. The solitude of Milton 
is rather the inevitable solitude of his disintegrating 
time. He was too masterful and too masterly not to 



296 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

be himself; and asserting himself, he asserts some- 
thing apart from others, not something which in- 
stantly appeals to common humanity. 

A subtle fact, this, and one which may seem doubtful. 
Yet, there can be little question that, whether or no, the 
great surviving figures of art and of letters are bound 
to have a double aspect. In one phase they are ever- 
lasting — persisting through the generations, safe above 
the storms of time. As such, perhaps, we are wisest 
generally to recognize and to consider them. But 
in another phase they prove, even despite themselves, 
men of their own time, too. And none was ever 
more so than this Milton — a Spenserian, touched 
by the traditions of Jonson, too, and of Donne; a 
maker of masques, like the playwrights; a maker, as 
well, of pastoral elegy, like Spenser and more; assert- 
ive, like any great poet, of his own individuality ; and 
thus asserting his individuality not a great man domi- 
nant — like Shakspere before him and Dryden after- 
wards — but a great man inevitably apart. 

These English poems, at which we have glanced 
as closely as is now possible, were the chief utterances 
of his early period. Immediately after he wrote 
"Lycidas" came his journey to Italy. In the course 
of this, he seems to have been cordially welcomed, 
wherever he travelled, by men of fastidious culture, 
who found in him an Englishman of such academic 
accomplishment as could maintain itself with the best 
of Continental Europe. In a way, as one glances at 



MILTON 297 

what records remain of his travels, these months of 
pleasant wandering in the regions which have always 
proved most sympathetically stimulating to English 
poets, and to American poets as well, seem the least 
solitary of his life. At any time there is scattered 
through the civilized world a little brotherhood of 
culture which eagerly recognizes its fellows, stray 
from whence they may. And often men of this type 
feel most themselves while they are wandering, — when, 
at each new turn, they meet congenial spirits with 
whom they do not linger long enough to differ. Such 
journeyings are not precisely fruitful. In the pleasant 
eagerness with which travellers suddenly feel the 
reality of regions and men who have been familiar 
to them only in the half light of reading and 
learning, there is little time left for such depth of 
experience as should instantly demand or find ade- 
quate expression. The days of journeying are not 
generally days of harvest; but the seeds which fall in 
those pleasant times are apt to sink deep. So in 
memory, as in anticipation, such days are apt to seem 
the most delightful granted on earth to those whom 
temperament, or the state of their times, condemns at 
home to solitude. 

The chief poetic traces of this period in Milton's life 
are the few Italian sonnets, in which he proved him- 
self so accomplished a man of culture. How these 
may seem to Italians, one can only guess. To Eng- 
lishmen, they confuse themselves with the work of the 



298 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

long forgotten Italian versifiers who in Milton's time 
prettily maintained the graceful fantasies of a highly 
conventionalized poetry. Whether their sentiment is 
genuine, no one knows. They may have been made for 
some living lady, who chanced to touch the fancy of 
the accomplished traveller from beyond the Alps and 
the Channel; just as the earlier Latin elegy which 
celebrates the charms of English girls may perhaps 
relate, in its conventional guise, some actual and inno- 
cent youthful flirtation. On the other hand, they 
may be merely conventional exercises, made during 
pleasant moments when the poet whose real individu- 
ality was so crescently austere abandoned himself 
freely to the lighter pleasures of confident scholarly 
mastery of his vehicle. At all events, the records of 
Milton's months abroad are records only of happily in- 
significant culture — of such temper as whiles away 
hours in graceful and harmless pleasure. 

With Milton this interval did not last long. Why 
he returned to England is not precisely known. It 
has been thought, and reasonably, that news of the 
rising troubles in his country made him feel that his 
place was there, where before long he had another 
part to play than that of a late Elizabethan poet, 
strengthened and individualized by the convictions of 
a Puritanism which was beginning to dominate him, 
just as it was striving to dominate his country. There 
may have been less spiritual reasons; the times were 
growing hard, and money was not to be had so much 



MILTON 299 

for the asking as it had been. At all events, home 
he came, and settled in London, and fell to teaching 
his nephews and the rest; and from that time on, for 
years, we hear little more of him as a poet. In the 
times about to come, there was other business than 
poetry for him; and he was Puritan enough to feel 
that, first of all, he must do his duty. 

It was after he came back to England, and before 
the period of his prose and his sonnets, that he wrote 
what we may regard as the last record of his 
earlier life. While he was abroad, his intimate friend, 
the half-Italian Diodati, had died. Edward King, 
it seems, whose death Milton commemorated in 
"Lycidas," was not personally very near to him. In 
that great elegy, the greatest memorial poem of our 
language, we might accordingly suppose him to have 
chosen the conventional pastoral form partly because 
the grief it celebrated was itself in some degree 
conventional. With Diodati the case was different. 
Yet when Milton, already the greatest master of Eng- 
lish verse then living, or living since, set himself to 
the heartfelt task of making a poetic monument for 
the friend who was probably his dearest, the form he 
chose for it was not only pastoral, but Latin, too. 

In those days, of course, Latin was still the common 
language of learning and of culture throughout the 
European world. A sound reason for Milton's choice 
of it might consequently be found in the fact that his 
Latin verses would convey their meaning not only to 



300 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Englishmen, but to all the elect of culture every- 
where. To outlive bronze or marble, he may have 
held, literature must express itself in the terms 
which had already survived the centuries. And those 
few of our contemporaries to whom the Latin lines 
still speak an undying and living language, profess 
to find in the "Epitaphium Damonis" a power and a 
passion as great as that of "Lycidas." This power 
and passion, they declare, is combined with a truly 
classical severity of form no longer mingled with the 
exuberant luxuriance of the Renaissance; it is com- 
bined, too, they tell us, with a depth of personal feeling 
which fills the poem not only with dignity and with 
beauty, but with the added humanity of pathos. To 
those, on the other hand, who know no more Latin than 
most of us learned at school, what seems most remark- 
able, and consequently most deeply characteristic, 
about this poem, is that the choice for a deeply sincere 
purpose of a vehicle so doubly conventional as a Latin 
pastoral proves Milton, beyond anything else we have 
touched on, a poet who desired less to express his im- 
pulses than faultlessly to observe the principles of his 
art as the doctrine of his time proclaimed them. 

With his work to come we have no concern now. 
That belongs rather to what was then the future than 
to what was then the past. The chief literary figure 
common to both of these periods is this Milton. At 
his early career we have now glanced. He began 
his work in the later years of the elder time; he 



MILTON 301 

was sensitive to all its finer influences, of scholar- 
ship and of culture alike; he was not so consciously 
superior to its mannerisms as the final isolation of 
his greatness may have made us commonly suppose; 
but his personality was so strong that whatever man- 
nerism he copied became subtly an expression of him- 
self. And this self of his, with its Puritan seriousness 
and austerity, was essentially solitary. And the times 
grew troublous. And they seemed to call him to be 
up and doing, otherwise than he had done in the 
gentle retirement of his youth and of his first man- 
hood. And he made his final monument of those 
elder days in the Latin pastoral which commemo- 
rated, after the fashion which he fancied should be 
most lasting of all, the man whom in those days he 
had loved best. And so he turned his face from the 
past, to the present, toward the future. 



XI 

THE MATURITY OF MILTON 

It may seem that we have dwelt too long on the 
earlier part of Milton's career — on the years when 
he was growing to the complete individuality which 
has left in our literature a grander record than any 
since, or than we can quite believe destined to be made 
by any poet to come. Yet the earlier years of life, 
though rarely the most significant, are apt to be the 
the most important. The date of a man's birth im- 
plies, as nothing else can, the surroundings amid 
which he grew to the maturity. 

So even though we must now speed on, we did 
well to recall how Milton was born before the dis- 
integration of his century had forced Puritanism 
into that place apart which so changed the course 
of English history; and how, with all the serious- 
ness of cultured Puritanism, he was convinced that, 
to be a true poet, he must make his life a 
true poem. We did well to recall how accordingly, 
while still a youth, he became, after the manner of his 
time, a master of classical learning, then far more 
humane than it is now; and how among Eng- 

302 



MILTON 303 

lish writers of Latin he was perhaps the most vitally 
individual. Above all, we did well to emphasize how, 
meanwhile, like any true man of letters, he was will- 
ingly sensitive to the influences of contemporary 
literature in his own language — chiefly, no doubt, to 
that of Spenser, but still unmistakably to those of 
Jonson, and Donne as well, and even to that of the 
drama; how he steadily revealed his individuality by 
mastering these influences, instead of being mastered 
by them, as lesser men were; and how, all the while, 
the disintegrating tendency of his time made him, 
despite his willing freedom from the eccentricity of 
petty talent, not the dominant figure of a growing 
school of letters, but a masterly poet more and more 
solitary and apart. In the prophetic indignation 
which inspired portions of "Lycidas," we may finally 
remember, there appeared at last clear token that, 
amid the rising troubles of the time, the Puritanism 
of Milton was passing into the militant form peculiar 
to the seventeenth century. 

There we left him; and there, in a way, we must 
take our farewell of him. For we have no time to 
linger over details of his personal history during the 
years which were still before him, nor yet to dwell on 
the grand beauties of the later works which have won 
him place among the few great poets of all time. 
We have time only for a glance at the three distinct 
records of his later years which remain so deeply indi- 
vidual and impressive. These, of course, are his 



3 o4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

prose writings; the sonnets which at intervals re- 
vealed how deeply his poetic power burned all the 
while when he held that duty bade him turn aside 
from poetry; and the great poems of his blind and 
retired solitude. Of all these we must speak hastily, 
touching only on such features of them as seem essen- 
tial to our purpose together. 

The prose works of Milton which are most gener- 
ally remembered were published between 1641 and 
1649. Only one of them — the "Areopagitica" — is 
much read nowadays; but the names of all are familiar 
to any student of literature. To careless students 
the names are apt to seem those of solitary things — 
unlike what anyone else wrote. Yet whoever will 
pause to consider not the lasting literature of Eng- 
land during the seventeenth century, but its printed 
records, must instantly grow aware that these include 
an enormous and bewildering mass of controversial 
prose, in every imaginable form. In copiousness and 
significance, these records are something like the 
newspapers of the last hundred years. Most of this 
old controversial prose has long been dead and gone; 
the spark which keeps some of Milton's alive, accord- 
ingly, makes it now seem a thing by itself. In fact, 
however, these works of his, in their own time, were 
only his earnest and passionate contribution to a 
torrent of expression, of which the bulk seems limit- 
less. One knows not whether most to wonder that 
none of the rest has survived, or that even Milton's 



MILTON 305 

power was great enough to give lasting life to a 
kind of writing essentially so ephemeral. 

And, on the whole, as you ponder on this prose 
of Milton's, together with the dead prose which was 
once alive about it, you are less and less apt to feel 
much difference between his and the rest. The 
"Areopagitica," we have just seen, has survived in sub- 
stance, — a fact sometimes held due to the circumstance 
that so much of it is incontestably right. Another way 
of stating the same fact would be to say that here, for 
once, in urging something like liberty of opinion, 
Milton chanced upon a principle which the history 
of ensuing centuries has happened to sustain. A 
different turn of history might conceivably have given 
similar sanction to his contentions concerning episco- 
pacy, or marriage, or royalty; and have withheld his- 
toric sanction from those which concerned liberty of 
thought and of expression. More and more, it seems 
to me, these prose writings of his group themselves his- 
torically together, just as they group themselves with 
other and similar writings of their own day. The im- 
pulse of them all was the impulse on which we touched 
so frequently when we were trying to give ourselves 
account of the growth and of the surroundings of 
seventeenth century Puritanism. The men of those 
years found themselves possessed by the conviction 
that they knew what was absolutely right; and that 
therefore they were bound, each in his own way, to set 
forth what was right, and to impose it — if by any effort 



3o6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

it might be imposed — on the errant course of human 
rights. For rights, everybody agreed, had strayed far 
from forms which anyone's conception of absolute 
right could sanction. If you desire concrete examples 
of the kind of expression which I had in mind when I 
touched on this matter before, you need seek no fur- 
ther than almost any of Milton's prose writings. 
Open your volume where you will; it is all one. 

In general, as we have seen, the controversial prose 
of seventeenth century England proved futile. On 
the whole, indeed, so far as positive and practical 
result goes, Milton's proved futile, too. What has 
really preserved it, in tradition, is not its substance, 
but rather the manner in which now and again that 
substance is set forth. Milton, we must remember, 
belonged to an age when English prose still preserved 
some of its pristine freedom from the trammels of 
convention. Though no longer Elizabethan, this prose 
was far nearer the spacious scope of the elder time than 
was any form of English poetry, lyric or dramatic. 
And indeed one may fairly doubt whether English 
prose has ever been in a state more fitted to express 
sincere and passionate individuality. So while in 
Milton's prose you may find dull passages enough and 
to spare, — crabbed passages, too, and passages dis- 
torted by that ugly virulence of temper which was 
inseparable from the acrimonies of his time, — you shall 
rarely search it long anywhere without coming upon 
passages which, wherever you found them, you would 



MILTON 307 

instantly recognize as in the nobler sense Miltonic. 
They are not fastidiously beautiful; they are far from 
the fantastic grace or quaintness which make so much 
seventeenth century rhetoric a pleasant toy for idle 
hours. They are hardly ever captivating or winning. 
But, with a sonorous fervor of their own, they are, 
in every sense of the word, admirable ; they excite your 
wonder, they excite your respect, and if only as noble 
outbursts of English eloquence they excite your ap- 
proval. There is nothing else like them in our lan- 
guage for a certain austere intensity of passion — an 
emotional quality so distinct from their meaning that 
you might often fancy it compatible with utterly 
different convictions and purposes from those which 
it sets forth. 

We might linger long over this emotional indi- 
viduality of Milton's — analyzing it, so far as we might; 
defining it. We might dwell, too, on the historically 
significant fact that the prose style of Milton is per- 
haps the last noteworthy example in English litera- 
ture of a kind of expression possible only when prose 
was still free — not yet bound by acknowledged prece- 
dent to follow convention. We might study in some 
detail the almost equally important fact that he was 
among the last writers of English prose who, when 
moved to earnest expression, instinctively thought in 
Latin terms; and who therefore suffused what they 
supposed to be vernacular expression with such sus- 
tained and sonorous rhythm as would have animated 



3 o8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

their phrases if they had actually written Latin. On 
the whole, however, the most important aspect for 
us of Milton's prose is one which concerns its sub- 
stance. 

In essence, we have seen already, this substance is 
not very different from that of the copious contro- 
versial writing then prevalent. Amid the bewilder- 
ing confusion of the times, individuals, believing each 
in his own that they knew what was right, at- 
tempted, each with his own limits, to persuade others 
to the right course. Among these individuals Milton 
was the most remarkable. He was no more free from 
traces of the epoch when he lived than were any of 
the rest; you can detect in him plenty of impatience, 
plenty of acerbity and virulence, and very little 
serenity. His earnestness was deeply Puritan, in that 
it was not tempered by wide human sympathy, nor yet 
sweetened with humor. But amid it all you can dis- 
cern in his individuality — more clearly perhaps than 
in that of any of his contemporaries — the aspect of 
human nature which made Puritanism at once 
potent and futile. From his very youth, we saw, 
Milton's nature had a kind of purity — of personal 
cleanness — which would have marked him, in any 
age, as one apart from the general frailties of human- 
ity. Men thus apart are never quite able to under- 
stand the kind of baseness which makes the earthly 
course of most men a matter of painful stum- 
bling. Were all men cast in such mould, human 



MILTON 309 

nature would not be the thing it is, nor human his- 
tory. 

The precise quality I have in mind is most evi- 
dent, perhaps, in that part of Milton's prose writings 
which, even in his own time, got him most into 
trouble, — his utterances concerning marriage and 
divorce, evoked by his far from peaceful conjugal 
experience. There is no need for commenting on 
them in detail, nor for pointing out how remote his 
opinions were from that dogmatic assertion of equal- 
ity between men and women which happens to be so 
popular nowadays. The important fact for us to re- 
mark is that, so long as men in general remain what 
men have been throughout recorded history, the kind 
of marital freedom urged by Milton could result, so 
far as any common-sense may assert, only in socially 
destructive licentiousness. Were most men Miltons 
the case would be otherwise. He never seems quite 
to have understood how far from Miltons most men 
have been, and are. And so, in urging a reform 
which, in his own case, might really have solved a 
social problem, he unwittingly argued for a state of 
society which is beyond the scope and power of ordi- 
nary human nature. 

What was thus true of Milton's argument concern- 
ing marriage and divorce seems, on the whole, true of 
all his contentions for reform, from beginning to end ; 
indeed it is apt to be true of earnest reformers through- 
out time. The greatest infirmity of noble minds, it 



310 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

often seems, is that they cannot understand the greater 
infirmity of minds which are not, and which never can 
be, noble. The Calvinism of the Puritans, to be sure, 
frankly and explicitly asserted that human nature is 
radically base. But when the Puritans themselves 
became militant reformers, they could not quite avoid 
the pitfall of militant reform throughout history. An 
earnest reformer, even though graced with humility of 
spirit, — and humility never seems to have been the 
chief spiritual grace of Milton, — is bound to conceive 
his opinions to be those of the elect. If he proceeds to 
impose those principles on other men, he attempts 
tyrannically to hold these others to a standard above 
that of human nature. If, on the other hand, he 
appeals to them, in the hope of stirring them to ac- 
quiescence, he assumes that their nature is higher 
than in fact he shall ever find it. In either case, he is 
doomed to tragic failure; he is forced in the end 
apart. His voice may echo down the ages, exhorting 
still, even till time ends; but those who dream that 
Utopias can be anything but dreams may never wake 
except to disappointment and to solitude. 

Of Milton's prose I can say no more. If these 
cursory words have helped to show its place in 
the temperamental history of England, if they have 
shown how far it goes to exemplify our generaliza- 
tions concerning the Puritans, they will have done all 
that we can now hope for. We must turn, in the 
same way, to Milton's brief and few poetic utterances 



MILTON 311 

meanwhile. These are the great sonnets which will 
always be among the glories of our literature. 

Among all his work, it seems to me, no part more 
clearly reveals his dominant individuality. If one may 
characterize this individuality, as it appears in litera- 
ture, by any single word, the word for it is perhaps 
masterly. Other poets now and again accept con- 
ventions, and imitate them, and perhaps improve 
them. Others deliberately break from convention, 
striving for novelty, for oddity, for eccentricity, for 
whatever may seem peculiarly their own. Now, from 
the beginning, Milton was eager to learn all he could 
from the great and good who had preceded him; but 
he used his learning and his culture to express a mean- 
ing so distinctly his own that his finally written words 
seem assertively Miltonic. Even in his early Spenser- 
ian verses, one thinks first of Milton; it is only when 
one begins to ponder that one feels how surely the 
influence of Spenser pervades the lines and the 
rhythm. And this is more true still of those passages 
in his early work which reveal the influences of Jon- 
son and of Donne. And "Comus" is first of all a Mil- 
tonic poem — not an English masque; and if we were 
considering merely the history of English pastorals 
it might be almost a surprise to find that among the 
rest we must study so individually Miltonic a poem as 
"Lycidas." Milton's prose, too, shows how his indi- 
viduality could pervade and waken into lasting life a 
kind of expression which in every other case than his 



312 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

withered almost as soon as the actual occasion of it 
became a matter of the past. In the sonnets, this 
masterly power is at its height. 

No English lyrics, I think, more clearly illustrate 
that modern definition of lyric poetry which holds it 
to be essentially subjective — an expression of what 
the poet actually thinks and feels. The old sonnets of 
Italy, the sonnets in general of Elizabethan England, 
and even the Italian sonnets which Milton himself 
made during his sojourn in the regions from which 
all our modern civilization has sprung, are at best 
pleasantly artificial. As works of art, they are now 
and again very beautiful; now and again, you are 
moved to wonder whether Sidney, or Shakspere, or 
whoever else, was not perhaps using this exquisitely 
ingenious vehicle to express not conventional but pas- 
sionately sincere emotion. Yet I am tempted to say 
that until Milton's own time you can never feel quite 
sure, either in England or in Italy itself, of how gen- 
uine a given sonnet is. Again and again you are sure 
that one of these little poems is a thing of beauty 
containing deathless phrases; yet all the while you 
are equally sure that it is a deliberate and a very 
elaborate work of rigidly conventional art. With 
Milton's sonnets the case is altogether different. 
Your first impression is sure to be that the poet meant 
every word he set down. He meant it, no doubt, 
with very different degrees of intensity; some of the 
sonnets are hardly more than occasional poems; two 



MILTON 313 

or three reveal the uglier phases of temper with which 
the virulent controversies of Milton's time disfigured 
many passages of his prose; but the best of them ex- 
press heartfelt meaning with a fulness of mastery 
which makes one forget that they are sonnets at all. 

You can find all these characteristics in the sonnet 
"On His Blindness," often held his best : 

When I consider how my light is spent 

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, 
And that one Talent which is death to hide 

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 

To serve therewith my Maker, and present 
My true account, lest He returning chide, 
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?" 

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent 

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need 
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed, 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest; 
They also serve who only stand and wait." 

As you ponder over these lines, you cannot but feel 
how they show his thorough knowledge of the intri- 
cate sonnet form, together with his masterful disdain 
of its finer technical niceties — of quatrain, octave, ses- 
tet, and the like. You cannot help feeling, either, 
how their involved syntax shows his Latin habit of 
thought. Yet, for all this, the poem seems as sincere 
an expression of personal feeling as you can find in 
any autobiography or confession. 



3 i4 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

He had done his active service by this time — to the 
state which for a while the Puritans had dreamed 
might replace the England of the past by an utterly 
regenerate England for all the future. And history 
was speeding fast. Before long the Protector was 
dead; and it was not much longer before the Restora- 
tion. A final darkness had fallen not only on the eyes 
of Milton, but on that Elizabethan England in which 
he was born, and on that Puritan England too which 
he had hoped to see established in its place. And it 
was amid this darkness that he made at last the poem 
which none but he could possibly have made. For as 
surely as Spenser is the maker of the "Faerie 
Queene," Milton is the maker of "Paradise Lost." 
That would remain, if all the rest vanished. 

Beyond the work which came before, and I am 
tempted to say beyond any other great work in liter- 
ature, this colossal epic stands apart. The more you 
study Shakspere's plays, the more close and intricate 
you find their relations to the literature of their time; 
the more normal they seem, for all their wonderful 
power. And glancing on to the third great figure in 
the history of English literature during this seven- 
teenth century, you can assure yourself that Dryden 
too was a man of a school, which he perhaps founded 
and certainly dominated; he was never a great figure 
apart. Even in Milton's earlier work, — to that very 
sonnet, indeed, in which he so solemnly recorded the 
sealing of his eyes, — you can feel, together with all his 



MILTON 315 

masterful individuality, trace after trace of the litera- 
ture about him. We have remarked the relations 
of Milton's early poems to the work of the elder poets 
— Spenser, and Donne, and Jonson; to that of some 
of the dramatists, as well, in their loftier moments; 
we have seen how he was affected by the literatures 
of antiquity and of Italy, and by the torrent of con- 
troversial prose which flowed before and about his 
prose utterances. Throughout, we have felt how 
his individuality, always inevitably assertive, was 
strengthening. In his later period this individuality 
had become something utterly apart — until "Paradise 
Lost" seems something almost superhuman. 

Superhuman, I mean, in its isolation, in its grand 
solitude. One cannot too often repeat that it is in 
nowise eccentric or abnormal, that it never seems 
deliberately different from what other men may have 
attempted. Nothing could be much more remote 
from the kind of oddity which now and again belittles 
much nineteenth century literature, in England and 
America alike. Carlyle is great, if you like, and so 
is Browning; so is Emerson; so, perhaps, in his own 
way, is that anarchistic Walt Whitman. But each is 
great, if great he be, in spite of his manner of expres- 
sion. No doubt, the distorted style of each may be 
due to some pitiable mental peculiarity, analogous to 
physical deformity; but nothing can prevent it from 
seeming deliberate. One and all of these moderns 
set forth their meaning in a kind of pervasive falsetto 



316 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

screech, uttered by each in his own discordant way, 
as if to attract attention to himself. In Milton there 
is never a trace of any such thing. "Paradise Lost" 
no more suggests intentional oddity than his early 
poems do, in their willing acceptance of all the aids 
which convention could give them. It only reveals, in 
a grandeur and a loneliness unspeakably superb and 
pathetic, the finally inevitable individuality of the one 
great poet who found his life and his lot cast in the 
disintegrant times of the English Puritans. So in the 
literature which came before it there is nothing to 
which we can instantly feel it similar; nor yet, and still 
more obviously, is there anything similar to it in the 
literature which came to light during the years when 
it was making; and there is nothing quite like it, 
either, in the literature of the centuries which have 
ensued. Milton's manner, no doubt, has been imi- 
tated by admirers in later times; yet none of these, 
I think, has in the least found the secret which makes 
every line of Milton Miltonic. Milton really stands 
alone — the one true poet of the national disintegra- 
tion of England. 

This does not in the least mean that the solitude of 
"Paradise Lost" is monstrous or at all miraculous. 
Its solitude, indeed, as I have tried to point out, 
marks the poem as a normal product of Milton's 
own time — a time when the elder solidarities were 
gone, and the newer still to come. And the very 
nature of its fable, to say nothing of the allusions 



MILTON 317 

throughout its course, marks it by the width of heaven 
apart from those occasional works of later poetry 
which pride themselves on eccentric originality of in- 
vention. It is conceivable, indeed, that "Paradise 
Lost" may have been in some degree instigated, or 
suggested, by Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas; 
it is perhaps possible that Milton's imagination may 
have been stimulated by some Dutch poem of Von- 
del's; and so on. That, if this be true, "Paradise 
Lost" transcends all traces of its lesser origins, until 
those origins become a matter of mere curiosity, only 
marks the poem as great. All great poems do the 
like. 

What marks its greatness almost uniquely is the re- 
lation it bears to those grand originals which show 
their traces throughout. The fable, of course, is taken 
from the very beginning of Scripture itself. The nar- 
rative throughout is enriched by endless allusion both 
to the whole course of Scripture and to almost the 
whole range of classical learning — to the acknowl- 
edged masterpieces of antique literature which have 
outlasted the centuries and emerged into the serene 
loftiness of immortality. Any poet can take his fable 
from Scripture, and can fill his verse with allusions to 
the great poetry of the past. It is the lot, the while, 
of almost every modern poet but Milton — of all the 
others, I am tempted to say, except Dante, already 
in Milton's time as immortal as he is to-day — that 
when, even for an instant, you compare their work 



318 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

with its supreme sources, you instantly feel that those 
sources welled far richer than the streams diverted 
from them. Shakspere, with colossal ease, could 
make permanent literature of his quaint mediaeval 
chronicles and stories; he could marvellously vitalize 
Plutarch, too; but in "Troilus and Cressida," the 
only play where he comes near measuring him- 
self with Homer or with any great precursor, 
you feel that, for all the glories of Shaksperean 
poetry, Shakspere presents a Trojan War which 
is far beneath the heights of the Iliad. And what 
happens to lesser men anyone can see who will 
compare the various modern plays and poems con- 
cerning Francesca da Rimini with the supreme pas- 
sage, in the fifth canto of Dante's "Inferno," where 
her story was first and finally told. 

With Milton, the case is wonderfully different. Read 
Scripture, if you will, and then turn to your "Paradise 
Lost." Turn then to whatever poet you chance to 
love of Greek antiquity or of Roman. Turn to Dante 
himself, who alone among modern poets had risen in 
Milton's time to something like the serene eminence in 
which men now discern the great poets of antiquity. 
Then turn back to Milton. Different, you will find him, 
no doubt, in the austere isolation of his masterful and 
deliberate Puritanism and learning; but that differ- 
ence does not make him irrevocably lesser. Rather 
you will grow more and more to feel how wonderful 



MILTON 319 

his power proves. Almost alone among poets, he 
could take the things for which he had need from the 
masters themselves, as confidently as any of the mas- 
ters had taken such matters from lesser men; and 
he could so place these spoils of masterpieces in his 
own work that they seem as truly and as admirably 
part of it as they seemed of the other great works 
where he found them. 

His own work, of course, in the fulness of his 
maturity, was more his own than ever. Throughout 
it you feel all the characteristics of which we have 
been trying to trace the growth — the Puritan seri- 
ousness of his earliest and constant purpose; his love 
of austere yet luxuriant beauty of form; his mastery \ 
of classical learning, as classical learning existed I 
in his seventeenth century; his wide and deliber- 
ately mastered erudition; and the embittered Puri- 
tanism which marked almost all English Puritans of 
the days of struggle and of failure. You feel him 
throughout a true poet; but a poet singular among 
the great ones for a deliberation, for a lack of appar- 
ent spontaneity, which in almost any other man 
could hardly have broken through the limits of superb 
rhetoric into the free air of lasting literature. Of all 
English poetic styles, his is the least inevitable, the 
most magnificently artificial, the furthest from un- 
thinking utterance. It is full of music, but the music 
is not vocal; it is more like that which immensely 



3 2o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

skilful hands can evoke from the incredibly complex 
mechanism of some vast church organ. And yet the 
phrases never sink to the level of mere convention; 
they are as distinctly, as irrevocably Milton's as was 
that blind solitude in the midst of which they were 
made. 

All the while, too, "Paradise Lost" remains a nor- 
mal human thing, in that it is truly a work of its 
own time. Not long ago, I was turning its pages 
in Italy, the country where Milton passed the months 
which one may guess to have been the pleasantest of 
his earthly life. A marvelous place, that Italy, with its 
immortally beautiful landscapes enshrining countless 
relics of mortal beauty — the grandeurs of ruined 
Rome, the quaint distorted splendors of the ages 
they used to call dark, the buoyant fine art of the 
resurgent Renaissance, the fantastic excesses of its 
luxuriant decline. As I read my Milton in Italy, 
I grew aware that the images which so grandly 
consoled his blindness seemed unlike those of the 
great Italian days. And yet they were such as any 
traveller in Italy must often see. They were very 
like the figures and the landscapes which make the 
visible traces of seventeenth century Italy, left by 
hands never themselves masterly, things from which 
we are apt to turn aside with some shade of disdain. 

Such impressions, no doubt, are too personal for as- 
sertion as true. But take at random some lines in 
which Milton sets forth the wonders of Eden: 



MILTON 321 

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; 
Others whose fruit burnished with golden rind 

Hung amiable — Hesperian fables true 

Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks 
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed, 
On palmy hillock; or the flowery lap 
Of some irriguous valley spread her store, 
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose. 
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves 
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine 
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps 
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall 
Down the slope hills dispersed, or in a lake, 
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned 
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams. 

Try to visualize that landscape, and you will be 
more ingenious than I if you can make it take much 
other form than you may see in the background of 
some Bolognese picture of Diana and her nymphs. 
Fancy, if you can, some sculptured Miltonic Adam or 
Satan; and see whether the form is not strangely like 
those colossally distorted ones which the Italians 
made in Bernini's time and after. Try to translate 
Milton's Eve into terms of painting; and tell yourself 
truly whether you can make those terms differ much 
from the manner we now think decadently artificial on 
the canvasses of Guido Reni or of the Caracci. When 
I said all this to the friend who chanced to be with me, 
he waxed a little warm; for he was accustomed to rev- 
erence Milton, and thought me almost blasphemous. 



322 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Nothing could have been further from my purpose. 
What impressed me most was not that Milton thus 
showed how in life, like every wholesome man, he was 
himself a man of the days when he walked the earth. 
It was rather that the grave, austere earnestness of 
his mastered purpose surged so supremely strong. 
Amid his century of artifice and of cultured affecta- 
tion, he was thus able, without disdaining contempo- 
rary terms, to make a supremely noble poem. In rev- 
erent admiration of its nobility one no more stops to 
remark its artifices than one stops to remember its 
origins. 

If "Paradise Lost" were all that was left of his work, 
or indeed if all we possessed were only some colossal 
fragments of "Paradise Lost," Milton would still be 
Milton. It is not that the two other great works of 
his later years — "Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
Agonistes" — would not repay deep and loving study. 
It is rather that, when we are speeding on as we must 
speed now, they add, I think, no new feature to the 
austere and solitary individuality which we have been 
trying to define together. Puritan from the begin- 
ning Milton was, in the lofty seriousness of his pur- 
pose; Puritan he proved himself more surely still, in 
that passionate interval of his life when all his ener- 
gies were given to the cause which he longed, with 
his fellow-Puritans, each in his own divergent way, to 
make dominant; Puritan most of all he seems in the 
sad and blind retirement of those later years when 



MILTON 323 

the dominance of Puritanism was fatally past. His- 
tory had surged beyond Puritan control; the only re- 
source left Milton was to enshrine the spiritual mean- 
ing- of his faith in his own austere, unwinsome, 
deathlessly noble terms. Thereby he enriched Eng- 
lish literature with a kind of masterly poetry as 
unlike all others as were the man and the age which 
brought it forth. 

When the great poems were made, to be sure, the 
age which truly inspired them was already a thing of 
the past. In strict chronology, they belong to the 
years when Pepys was writing his diary, and Butler's 
"Hudibras" was in the full freshness of its trivial popu- 
larity. The new literature of the Restoration was 
springing into its unlovely being, and other forces 
were at work which were finally to ripen into modern 
literature. Decadent beyond what had come before 
this new phase of English expression may well seem 
by itself. In truth, however, it was tending toward 
the approaching reintegration of national temper in its 
modern form. With all that, so far as we can touch 
on it at all, we must concern ourselves later. Now 
we can only glance at it, as it helps us to define the 
lofty surviving isolation of Milton. 

For with Milton, as I have tried to make increas- 
ingly clear, this isolation was not only, and perhaps 
not chiefly, a matter of temperament or of choice. In 
Elizabethan days the national temper of England was 
an integral thing — with its spontaneity, its enthusiasm, 



324 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

and its versatility. We have traced the disintegration 
of it, in various forms, during the years when 
Elizabethan England faded into the past, and when 
the tide of Puritanism rose, and when the passions of 
men, on every side, were stirred by fierce and futile 
efforts to make right control rights and to turn the 
course of history. It was during these days that 
Milton grew into his consciousness, and his increas- 
ing, deliberate mastery of his powers. His earliest 
poems, the precocious psalms of his boyhood, seem 
to have been written just about the time when King 
Charles came to the throne; and "Lycidas" was 
written toward the end of 1637. Those were the 
years when the drama was declining, when lyric poetry 
was specializing and weakening, when prose, de- 
spite its freedom, was tending to express no longer 
the temper of the nation but only isolated individ- 
uality. Then came the second stage of Milton's life, 
when he made his prose and his sonnets; when public 
duties, for a while, took him altogether from litera- 
ture, and left him blind at last. This period embraces 
the next twenty years — from 1640, we may hastily say, 
till 1660. A mere glance at any tables which record 
the publications of those years will reveal the con- 
fusion which pervaded them. 

We can sum up, in a way, the characteristics which 
mark all Elizabethan utterances as Elizabethan. So, 
turning to a later time, we can sum up, in some man- 
ner of intelligible phrase, the characteristics which 



MILTON 325 

make the utterances of the eighteenth century distinct 
from those which came before or from those which 
have followed. But to sum up in any phrase which 
should generalize their individualities the men who 
published during these twenty years of Milton's busy 
activity would be little short of a miracle. Here are 
some of the names of them: Sir Thomas Browne, 
Denham, Fuller, Davenant, Jeremy Taylor, Francis 
Quarles, Waller, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herrick, Love- 
lace, Andrew Marvell, Richard Baxter, Hobbes, Izaak 
Walton, and Cowley. 

Individual these men may well seem — more indi- 
vidual, at first glance, than the greater ones of the 
greater days which came before; but not, like those 
elder men, brethren. Nor yet were they quite breth- 
ren of their contemporary, Milton, whose very indi- 
viduality and isolation, we can begin to see, was the 
characteristic which proves him most conclusively a 
true man of his time. 

For the age of Shakspere, which was past, had been 
an integral age; and the age of Dry den, which was to 
come, was to be an integral age, too. In passing 
from one to the other, England was forced through 
a period of spiritual disintegration ; and in this period 
there chanced to live the one English poet, since 
Shakspere, who is incontestably and forever among 
the lastingly great poets of literature. And this he 
could not have been unless he had been, in his earthly 
life, a man of the days through which it was his lot to 



326 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

live. Nor could he have been a man of those swiftly 
changing days if the features of him, as we see him 
now, in the lengthening perspective of the centuries, 
were not individual above all things else — grave, lofty, 
austere, deliberate, noble, and blind. 

To speak of him with any shade of comprehensive- 
ness has been impossible. All I can hope is that 
these hasty words may have helped you to see him 
a little more clearly, in his historical relations, than 
you might have seen him without them. 



XII 

THE AGE OF DRYDEN 

The task left us is to sum up, as best we can, the 
literary history of England during the last forty years 
of the seventeenth century. These years began with 
the Restoration of King Charles II. ; they included his 
inglorious reign and the expulsion of James II. from 
the throne; and they ended under the constitutional 
sovereignty of King William III. The very names of 
these sovereigns, repeated by rote as children learn them, 
tell the story of the change in English temper which 
had occurred since 1642, when the Civil Wars broke 
out. In the perspective of time this change seems the 
most critical in all English history. For the England 
of the elder days — the England before the Common- 
wealth — seems an old, strange England ; and that which 
came after the Commonwealth seems, in little more 
than an old-fashioned way, the England which is Eng- 
land still. 

It was during the earlier of the years at which we 
must now glance so quickly that Milton was making 
his great poems. They are the lasting and surviving 
expression of a period which was past when he wrote 

327 



328 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

them, a period which had finally vanished when the 
Restoration proved that the dreams of the Puritans 
could not control the course of history. As we re- 
marked when we turned from these poems to glance 
at their environment, it was during the years which 
produced them that Pepys was writing his diary. 

Pepys was born ten years before the Civil Wars 
broke out. When King Charles met his end, Pepys 
was only sixteen years old. When the diary begins, 
in the year 1660, he was not quite twenty-eight; and 
when he left off writing it, he was hardly thirty-seven. 
Somehow one is apt to think of him rather as an oldish 
man — which, indeed, he lived to be. But, in fact, 
these memoranda of which the deciphering has made 
him the most intimately familiar of all Englishmen, 
were jotted down almost from his youth and ended 
very early in his middle age. What they really record, 
with unique minuteness of fidelity, is the aspect in 
which daily life presented itself to an extraordinarily 
curious and busy young man who had grown to his 
maturity, such as it was, during the Commonwealth, 
and who had not the strength, even if he had been so 
inclined, to resist the influences about him during the 
first ten years of the Restoration. He had a remark- 
able power of perceiving whatever chanced to come 
uppermost in his consciousness, — whether this were a 
matter of fact, or an opinion, or merely some passing 
reflection, — and of jotting down his daily notes in 
terms which instantly convey his state of mind to the 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 329 

minds of other people. Other people, to be sure, were 
never meant to read these records. There are moods 
in which, through all the endless entertainment they 
so surely afford, you feel some such twinges of self- 
respecting conscience as you feel when you do not resist 
temptation to overhear chattily confidential talk. But 
you catch so much of Pepys's own mood, the while, 
that you are not disposed to let the niceties of con- 
science hamper you. And so, with his help, you get, 
by and by, perhaps the most vivid impression of a 
past time which you can get from any book in the 
world. You feel almost as if you had actually lived 
through those seventeenth century years which Pepys 
has kept alive. 

They were old-fashioned years, you feel, — quaint, 
both in their daily conduct and in their phrases. 
This quaintness, indeed, is what disposes us unthink- 
ingly to fancy Pepys so much older a man than he 
actually was. But this very tendency indicates what 
in the end I cannot but feel the most significant 
aspect of the diary. The pages impress you like the 
garrulously confidential talk of some entertaining old 
person whom you have known. And the oldest per- 
sons you have known and listened to — though as a 
rule their memories have kept most vividly before 
them a state of life which faded before your own 
memory began, — are after all people who partly belong 
to the same world that you live in ; they are not deni- 
zens of one historically different. To my mind, the 



33o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

diary of Pepys is the first book in English which in- 
stantly produces the impression of proceeding, for all 
its oddities, from an older form of just the same 
society in which we are living — or at least of that in 
which our grandfathers lived. A few familiar names 
will perhaps make my meaning clearer. Defoe was 
born the year after the diary was begun; the novels 
which he made in the first quarter of the eighteenth 
century carry the impression forward. When Defoe 
died, Samuel Johnson was already of age. When 
Johnson died, Walter Scott was a boy of fourteen. 
Thackeray might have known Scott well. And it is 
hard for men of fifty at this moment to realize that 
Thackeray has even yet ceased to be quite contempo- 
rary. I have taken the names at random. There are 
numberless others which might have served our pur- 
pose as well ; and all would tell the same story. From 
the time of Pepys to our own there has never been 
a radical change in the life of England as set forth 
by literature. 

When Pepys was born, on the other hand, Shakspere 
had been dead less than twenty years; the first folio 
had been in existence less than ten, and Ben Jonson 
was still the living laureate. These very names, taken 
almost equally at random, indicate a national change, 
between 1632 and 1660, greater than is indicated by all 
the two centuries of the others put together. The elder 
world, during the last days of which Pepys saw the 
light, was to the end, in greater or less degree, spon- 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 331 

taneous, enthusiastic, versatile. His own newer world, 
which has lasted almost to our own time, was none of 
these. When I seek a word to note the impression 
which it makes on me, in comparison, I can find none 
better than the neither very definite nor very happy 
word, tenacious. 

Yet the characteristics of which the later world has 
been tenacious are not those which first appeared on its 
surface. Even in the earliest edition of Pepy's Diary, 
— and still more in those later ones which, with more 
regard for historical precision than for considerate 
discretion, have made public so many details of ex- 
tremely private nature, — one cannot help feeling, year 
by year, the swift growth about the man, and some- 
times in his own character, of what at first sight would 
seem an utterly decadent corruption. It is a common- 
place that the fashion of England, repressed for half a 
generation by the impracticable austerities of Puritan- 
ism, reacted into an open licentiousness not quite 
paralleled before or afterward ; it is a commonplace, too, 
that at the same time the moral saws of Puritan domi- 
nance did not quite die out. As one reads Pepys, these 
commonplaces spring into a life so vivid that one 
laughs at oneself for finding that here they seem — 
what just then they probably were — something like 
novelties. Here, in its heyday, is what to foreign eyes 
has ever since seemed the hypocrisy, the cant of modern 
England, — the virtuous phrasing, the far from virtuous 
conduct, — the characteristic which, at a moment of 



332 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

sad international tension, Lowell satirized, across seas, 
in some of those lines from the "Biglow Papers" which, 
once read, stick in memory : 

Old Uncle S., 

Sez he, I guess 

John preaches well, sez he; 

But sermon through, 

And come to do, 

Why, there's the old J. B. 

A-crowdin' you and me. 

This Pepys went to church and listened to sermons as 
smugly and as honestly as any Puritan you please; he 
attended to his business admirably; he pried, inno- 
cently and without innocence, too, into the affairs of 
other people; he was insatiably curious about all man- 
ner of things, good and bad ; and he misconducted him- 
self with little more sense that what he did was not 
a matter of course than he felt in publicly presenting 
himself at divine service. To feel what this truly 
signifies concerning national character and temper, you 
must glance forward at the English literature of later 
times than those with which we are directly concerned 
— at the "Spectator," at "Tom Jones," and "Amelia," 
at the novels of Jane Austen, and at those of Thackeray. 
In the course of the generations, you will feel at last, 
the divergence between preaching and practice, which 
once seemed appalling hypocrisy, tended to pass into 
a phase where one can hardly name it by much more 
serious terms than sham or humbug. In which fact, 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 333 

you may begin to perceive, I think, how to this day 
the real tenacity of England has been a tenacity of the 
one sound trait which revealed itself in that reckless 
time: this was common-sense, as distinguished from 
vague and untested ideals, however admirable they 
may appear. 

But we stray from the matters immediately before 
us. Our real business is to glance at the new literature 
which came so quickly into being after the Restoration. 
To dwell on it in detail is not now in our power; and 
on the whole we need hardly regret the fact. Though 
beyond question this literature is historically important, 
a glance at any considerable body of it will suffice to 
show that it has little positive merit. Toward the end 
of Samuel Johnson's literary life was made that copious 
collection of British poets which his admirably charac- 
teristic introductory biographies have kept alive. For 
years the fifty-odd volumes in which they comprise 
the works of poets between Cowley and Gray have 
been favorite little books of mine; and of all their 
characteristics none has grown more salient than the 
number of writers whom Johnson's publishers thought 
worth preserving and who would otherwise be, for 
general readers, hardly so much as names. A num- 
ber of these flourished during the years we now 
have in mind. In general they may be held repre- 
sentative of the lyric poetry which increased the mass 
of English literature between 1660 and 1700. Only 
two among them have retained any importance. Butler 



334 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

has lasted to some degree; so, in far higher dignity, 
has Dryden. As for the rest, one need hardly remem- 
ber them apart to-day. One need remember only 
that in their own time they were, or at least aspired 
to be, poets of fashion, as distinguished from anything 
more serious ; that the fashion of their time was trivial 
and corrupt ; and so that you find them to express little 
else than triviality or corruption. 

As I write, a quatrain — from Rochester, I think, — 
springs to memory : 

Should some brave youth, worth being drunk, prove nice, 
And from the gay encounter faintly shrink, 

'Twould please the ghost of my departed vice 
If, at my counsel, he repent and drink. 

It rather innocently illustrates what I have in mind 
concerning this fashionable poetry. It shows, too, 
how the same fashion demanded a certain superficial 
amenity of manner — general lucidity of phrase, 
smoothness of flow, whatever should least strain the 
attentive power of readers. In brief, though the Eng- 
lish politeness of those forty years was far from lofty, 
the whole character of this later seventeenth century 
poetry is rather polite than fervid or spontaneous. It 
tends straight toward the rigidly polite and cool con- 
ventions of the couplet, which dominated all the Eng- 
lish poetry of the century then to ensue. It never seems 
broadly popular, never comprehensively national in 
the sense in which one felt so the elder and integral 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 335 

literature of Elizabethan times. But neither does it 
seem individual, or solitary, as the disintegrant poetry 
seemed which followed toward the mid-century. 
Rather, the manner in which the individuality of 
writers is absorbed by the general type of their work 
suggests something analogous to the integrity of the 
earlier days. This new literary integrity, however, 
is not one of all-embracing national character; it is 
rather an integrity of a fashionable class apart. 

The temper of this fashionable class certainly ani- 
mates the most popular poem of the early Restoration, 
and perhaps the one work which could have proceeded 
from no other period, — Butler's "Hudibras." Pepys, 
who among his other merits was a frankly independent 
critic when he made his jottings for himself, thought 
ill of it. But the shrewdness of its occasional epigram 
and the imitable facility of its doggerel and of its as- 
tonishing rhymes have proved, in their own way, per- 
manent. It was these, no doubt, which gave it instant 
popularity with all that sort of English folk who wel- 
comed the downfall of dominant Puritanism ; in all like- 
lihood, however, they welcomed it still more because of 
its obviously extravagant satire. Satire, hitherto a 
rather minor form of English poetry, became and for 
a good while remained perhaps the most important. 
English satire has never been very fine; excellent 
satire, indeed, demands such national tempers as have 
made epigrammatic the idioms of Rome and of Paris ; 
and in this Hudibrastic form English satire was more 



V 



336 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

crude than it was later. Of its sincerity, too, one can- 
not feel much more sure than one may generally feel 
in our own time concerning the sincerity of journalism. 
Throughout it, however, one can detect a trait really 
characteristic of such a society as welcomed and en- 
couraged it. Sincere or not, satire is essentially a kind 
of writing which pretends to unmask pretence. The 
burlesque excesses of "Hudibras," of course, like the 
more formal invectives of other and later English 
satire, are preposterous. All the same, they must have 
seemed in their day refreshingly veracious as compared 
with canting parodies of virtue and decency. At that 
moment the recoil from impracticable Puritan ideals 
was extreme ; and assertion of any ideals had come for 
the while to appear deliberately false. 

We come dangerously near what is far from my real 
purpose — the appearance of casuistical defence. The 
licentious excesses of the Restoration were abomi- 
nable ; and the literature which recorded them remains 
so. At the same time, these excesses, both in life and 
in letters, are facts; and they are facts which marked 
a period not destined to be one of lasting national 
decline. In their obvious aspect, as commonplace has 
it, they were the surging reaction of the baser phrases 
of human nature which had been repressed, for too 
many years, by the futile dominance of the Puritans. 
There is another aspect of them, not exactly better, 
but at least less despicable, in which we may regard 
them rather as a cynical, but not for that reason a dis- 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 337 

honest, expression of impatience with any form of 
morally pretentious untruth. If there be a better tem- 
per in them at all, if there be any sentiment for which 
we may still feel a gleam of respect, it may be expressed 
something like this : We have had enough of canting 
idealists, the fashionable temper of the Restoration 
seems to say ; and we have experienced the oppressions 
and the anarchy into which their mendacious vagaries 
plunged us. Let us face facts as they are — ugly, riot- 
ous, perhaps gay, but surely wicked and abandoned. 
Facts are our nearest guides to truth, after all. Make 
of them what you will; it is better to recognize that 
whatever is is right than to pretend any longer that 
the only right things are things which never can exist 
in such a world as this of ours. 

It is only, I think, when we take some such view 
of the matter as this that we can understand how, in 
Queen Anne's time, a personage at once so typical and 
so worthy as Sir Roger de Coverley could emerge from 
the later years of a society among the favorite amuse- 
ments of whose youth had been the comedies of the 
Restoration. Mummified to-day in their stained 
quartos or their cracked leather bindings, or unwrapped 
in all the ugly nakedness of reprint, they are repellent 
things. There are traces of wit in them still, and 
of ingenuity; but there is no lingering trace of the 
poetry — of the lyric grace, of the old romantic spirit 
and beauty — which lingered even in the plays of 
Shirley. And, at least to modern readers, they are 



338 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

not only more vile things than you can find elsewhere 
in accepted English literature, before or since ; they are 
also, what in some moods seems worse, inexhaustibly 
tedious in their long-drawn-out monotony of effrontery. 
You cannot believe them, either, a bit more sincere, 
a bit more truly honest, than many of the satires seem 
which form so characteristic a phase of the lyric poetry 
contemporary with them. Yet, for all this you can 
hardly fail to detect in them two traits at once charac- 
teristic of their time and not unwholesome. They 
profess to set forth plain fact, as distinguished from 
all manner of moral pretence; and this they attempt 
to set forth in a style which approaches the language 
of daily life, as distinguished from the vagaries of the 
elder theatrical rhetoric. The fashionable public to 
which they appealed was one which had had enough 
of sham, of cant, of impracticable and misleading ideals 
in whatever form. What it demanded and welcomed 
was something which should seem, for the moment, 
shrewdly to assert a state of things approved by 
common-sense. 

In this aspect, and I think in no other, the comedies 
of the Restoration show themselves to be something 
more than records of a passing but extreme reaction 
from the excesses of Puritanism- — something more, too, 
than traces of the real decadence which had overtaken 
courtly fashion, no longer to be politically dominant 
in England. They prove also to contain premonitory 
traces of that prudent and tenacious recognition of the 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 339 

value of facts, as distinguished from untested ideals, 
which, for two centuries after them, was to be so 
strong a feature of the English national character. 

It was during the years, we have seen, when this 
literature of the Restoration was pursuing its mad 
career that Milton, in austere solitude, was making the 
great poems which record the spirit of the elder Puri- 
tanism. During the same years, old Izaak Walton, 
who had been born so long ago as the time when 
Marlowe was killed, was writing his later lives of 
Anglican worthies, which so gently record the sweeter 
temper of the past. And during these same years, too, 
there was growing to its ripeness a work which, a little 
later, gave a place in permanent literature to the spirit 
of devout dissent, still burning beneath the fashionable 
surface of life. One is sometimes disposed to feel, 
indeed, that — apart from the great poems of Milton — 
Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" is the one English work 
between the Restoration and the eighteenth century 
which has never lost its hold on human beings and 
which never can lose it. There is nothing else from 
those days which one would not spare sooner. 

What gives it this diuturnity, to be sure, is hardly its 
substance, but rather the vividness of its narrative, the 
rugged force and humor of its characterization, and 
the wonderful felicity with which, in a dialect of its 
own, it adapts the English of the Bible to its homely 
service. These merits, all the while, are such as Bun- 
yan would not much have valued. They are not of 



34o THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the essence of his purpose ; they are rather the accidental 
vanities which, in setting that purpose forth, he could 
in nowise avoid. A few years ago, in an elaborately 
classified American library, I chanced to look for the 
"Pilgrim's Progress" on the shelves appropriated to 
English literature. Finding no trace of it there, I was 
driven to search for it in the catalogue, where it 
presently appeared duly recorded under the heading 
of Dogmatic Theology. After the combined amuse- 
ment and vexation which accompanied this discovery, 
I found myself rather disposed to think the classifica- 
tion defensible. Though far from indicating the 
whole character of the book, it comes fairly near indi- 
cating the actual intention of it. The allegory, the 
parable, was meant not to entertain, but actually to 
teach immortal truth; — to teach it, no doubt, in an- 
other guise than that assumed by creeds, but not in 
much other spirit. 

And the truth which Bunyan thus sought to teach 
is the same truth which in a widely different way had 
inspired Milton to make his great poems; it is the 
same truth, too, which, during those very years, New 
England was attempting to embody not in literature, 
but in the structure of a society willing to accept its 
domination — the truth as the Puritans conceived it. In 
those days English Puritanism had passed beyond the 
stage where Puritanism still lingered in New England. 
In the mother country all hope that the Puritans might 
politically dominate had faded; and, as you ponder on 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 341 

your memory of the "Pilgrim's Progress," you can feel 
this fact implicitly set forth there. The seeker for 
salvation no longer attempts to mould the world about 
him into another form than that which divine justice, 
or fate, or whatever you will, has imposed upon it. 
What he does attempt, wherever he finds himself, is 
only to tread for himself the true path. If thereby 
he can avoid destruction, he can show by example what 
other men should do. There was never a world so 
evil that good lives could not be lived in it. If godly 
men cannot dominate the vanities, they may at least 
persevere ; and, after all, the most that the best of them 
may wisely hope for is that perseverance should spring 
up all about them. The more of us who seek salvation, 
the more may find it; and the highest ideal of all is 
that more and more shall seek it and shall find. Let 
each of us seek, then, if he will ; humbly admitting that 
the dream of earthly dominance, so hopelessly disap- 
pointed a little while ago, was only another earthly 
vanity. Pagan, Pope, or Presbyter, it is all one; but 
the straight and narrow path still stretches before all 
who are willing devoutly to tread it. 

Bunyan, very likely, would have been far from 
assent to such statement as this of his purpose, — a 
statement rather of the mood which results from read- 
ing his wonderful allegory than of any precise teach- 
ing you may find set down or intentionally implied 
in its pages. Yet this mood seems to me both one 
which naturally results from the reading and one which 



342 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

goes far to place the pages in their historical setting. 
They were written in the world of which Pepys had 
so vividly recorded the first years; in the world from 
which Milton sadly sat apart, turning the inner eyes of 
his grave imagination back toward the fallen hopes of 
other days; in the world which had echoed with 
laughter over the lines of "Hudibras," and had wel- 
comed with the noisy gaiety of its licentious fashion 
all the enormities of Restoration comedy. In every 
superficial or dominant aspect, it seemed a world more 
utterly fallen from spiritual grace than any which had 
come before. Yet, even in its ribaldries, as we saw a 
little while ago, we may discern, without attempting 
casuistically to defend them, something like a whole- 
some trait. At least, these roisterers, in their crude 
and coarse cynicism of spirit, disdained the falsehood 
of denying falsehood, the vice of cloaking vice. They 
had had enough of pretence that human nature and 
human life could be better things and graver than they 
knew them. They would rather face fact than disguise 
it, — face it carelessly, recklessly, contemptuously and 
contemptibly at once. At least they would not mouth 
loftily empty ideals, to which fact everywhere gave 
the lie. 

Yet all the while ideals persisted, strong and uncon- 
querable as ever. The difference, when you compare 
the Restoration with the generation before, seems to be 
that ideals no longer yielded to the vanity of dreaming 
that they could materially conquer. Conquest and 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 343 

earthly power belong to sovereignty, and we are bidden 
render unto Csesar the things which are Caesar's. We 
are not forbidden, at the same time, to provide our- 
selves with practical constitutional safeguards. Caesar 
may not trespass on our rights; but neither may we 
trespass on Caesar's. So long as he does not trespass, 
then, leave the world to him ; and leave his responsibil- 
ity to powers beyond the world. Let the world be evil 
as it may, let is rush headlong as it will to destruction. 
At worst we have, among our rights, the right to rec- 
ognize, each for himself, ideal truth, and the right to 
strive for it each as best he may without trespass. No 
matter how base facts may be, ideals, so long as they be 
kept purely ideal, are facts, too; and facts all the more 
potent for their very disdain of material power. The 
centuries will show whether the true and lasting facts 
are those vile earthly ones which the shameless satirists 
and dramatists are setting forth in their nakedness, or 
those which nothing shall prevent earnest men from 
peacefully proclaiming in all their ethereality. 

In some such mood as this, it seems to me, we may 
see the historical meaning not only of the allegory in 
which Bunyan enshrined the spirit of devout dissent, 
but the meaning as well of the sermons in which, dur- 
ing those years and during years then to come, good 
men persistently preached righteousness from the pul- 
pits of the Established Church. No one could long 
pretend that King Charles II. was in any sense an 
edifying Defender of the Faith ; and, for all the various 



344 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

merits of his royal successors, few of these titular 
heads of the National Church have shown themselves 
precisely saintly. There have been periods meanwhile 
when spiritual grace has not been the most conspicuous 
feature of the Anglican clergy. But there has never 
been a moment when the Church, in the earnest belief 
of its earnest members, has not still been held histori- 
cally the Church; nor yet a moment when an honest 
and earnest minister of that Church could not sincerely 
set forth, amid all the earthly sins and wickedness that 
may have surrounded him, the ideals of faith and of 
conduct which, however men or clergymen may have 
strayed from them, the Church has kept steadfastly 
in its custody. The Church, from the beginning of 
the Restoration, possessed the vitality which it has 
preserved ; so did dissent. The earnestness of England 
has never really failed; and it has persisted, I am 
tempted to think, the more surely because it has never 
again tried to deny fact, and to make spiritual ideals 
materially dominant. 

Vague and elusive as we may perhaps find the course 
of thought we are now attempting to follow together, 
we have come fairly near to generalizing several facts, 
at first sight distinct. First and greatest we touched 
on the isolated poems of Milton, revealing how grandly 
the spirit of the mid-century lingered for a while amid 
the baseness of the newer times. Our subsequent busi- 
ness has been with the literature peculiar to that new 
epoch. We glanced at the wonderfully unreserved rec- 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 345 

ords of every-day reality which have been deciphered 
from the private manuscripts of Pepys ; we glanced at 
"Hudibras ;" we glanced at the fashionable poets, and 
at the writers of comedy, and finally we glanced at the 
"Pilgrim's progress." Taken together, these principal 
phases of Restoration literature do reveal, it seems 
to me, a common trait, — a trait which at once dis- 
tinguishes them from all the literature of the earlier 
seventeenth century, and marks them as precursors of 
all the English literature for the century to come. 
And this trait I may call, perhaps, by no more solemn 
name than common-sense, — an impulse, more mature 
than that of elder times, to recognize and to respect 
plain fact, and to hold that ideals are things essentially 
apart, not to be ignored or neglected, but not to be 
confused with the inevitable circumstance of material 
existence. 

There are one or two other aspects of English 
thought in these same years which may help us define 
this impression. Though not precisely within our 
range as students of literature, they may consequently 
deserve an instant of attention. When, a good while 
ago, we touched together on the works of Bacon, we 
dwelt a little on the fact that Elizabethan science was 
not in a state which could possibly warrant the magnifi- 
cently comprehensive generalizations he attempted. In 
1660, — the year when Pepys began his diary, the year 
when Charles II. was welcomed back to his throne by 
such poets of the elder time as Davenant and Cowley, 



346 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

and by such poets of the newer days as Waller and 
Dryden, — there was laid what we may call the founda- 
tion-stone of the impregnable English science to come ; 
in plainer words, the Royal Society was founded. 
Before the seventeenth century ended, the records of 
English science and philosophy already included, to 
go no further, the work of Boyle, of Newton, and of 
Locke. To dwell on this in detail is beyond our 
province. But the chief fact which these names imply 
seems surely, in another guise, the same fact which we 
have begun to discern elsewhere. The national temper 
of England was at last in a state where its most serious 
purpose was to ascertain indisputable truth, to plant 
its feet on solid ground. So when, disdaining tempta- 
tion to the vagaries of untested generalization, English 
men of science vigorously devoted themselves to ob- 
servation and experiment, they positively and perma- 
nently enriched human knowledge. In science the age 
was far more memorable than in literature; just as the 
age before had been far more memorable in literature 
than in science. This does not mean that imagination 
or fervor flagged; it means rather that, in obedience 
to the true spirit of their time, imagination and fervor 
were growing content to exert themselves within the 
limits of certainty. 

Again, though the fact belongs to the later years 
of the forty over which we are now hurrying together, 
the Bank of England was founded before the century 
ended. It is not too much to say that between the 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 347 

Restoration and the death of John Dryden, both the 
science and the finance of modern England came finally 
into existence. And Dryden, whose career extended 
throughout this period when England was at last prov- 
ing itself modern, was the first eminent man of English 
letters whose work throughout seems a modern thing — 
something which belongs rather to our own time than 
to times gone before. 

When I planned these lectures, accordingly, in the 
better proportions from which I have been forced to 
depart, I meant to give the last one wholly to him; 
for it seemed to me that a consideration of his writings 
would define and summarize, better than anything else, 
our impression of the later seventeenth century. He 
was about a year older than Pepys; so, like Pepys, he 
could remember the Civil Wars, and he grew up dur- 
ing the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. He pub- 
lished "Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell ;" 
and a year later he published an ode of welcome to the 
restored King Charles II. He was among the earliest 
and most acceptable writers of Restoration comedy. 
His dramas and tragedies in heroic rhyme are the most 
copious and respectable examples of the passing fashion 
which attempted to replace the dead conventions of 
Elizabethan tragedy by something more like the splen- 
did artificialities of classical tragedy in France. As a 
satirist he was at once the most robust and incisive of 
his day, and as little hampered by conscience as the 
weakest. At one time he was a member of the Church 



348 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

of England, at another a Roman Catholic. His occa- 
sional verses — the only one which has surely survived is 
the ode to music, commonly called "Alexander's Feast" 
— show him, to the very end, a master of lyric method. 
His occasional prose, mostly in the form of copious 
prefaces and dedications, shows him at once a man of 
wide though careless reading in all ranges of literature 
— ancient and modern — and, whatever one may think 
of his opinions in detail, a vigorously sensible critic. 
Not only his satires, but his many translations and 
adaptations into contemporary terms of matters from 
foreign literatures and from the older English, went 
further than any other work of their time toward im- 
posing on English verse the yoke of the couplet which 
it bore through a full century to come. His prose style 
has at last, in robustly pristine form, the cool lucidity 
and balance which, swiftly becoming more and more 
conventional, marked subsequent English style for more 
than a hundred years. Beginning with no particular 
eminence or advantages, he had made himself, long 
before the end, more dominant in English letters than 
any man had been before him, except Ben Jonson, or 
than any later man became except that other Johnson, 
who so strongly imposed his personality on literature 
during the later eighteenth century. And, in a way, 
one feels that the dominance of Dryden was perhaps 
the least disputed of the three. 

Throughout, whether in his more careless moments 
or in his more earnest, his work seems that of a man 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 349 

whose unquestionable power never so carried him away 
as to bewilder his shrewd recognition of contemporary 
fact, his fundamentally cool common-sense. He almost 
always wrote and often seems intentionally to have 
thought, in the fashion of the moment, leading it when 
he could, following it when he must. He was a 
Trimmer, more than once, if you like ; but not for that 
reason contemptible, as trimmers seem at certain other 
times in history. Rather, the trimmers of his time 
seem, whether they quite knew it or not, people who 
were content to recognize fact which they could not 
control. The power which diverts historic force, they 
seem to have felt, knows better than any prating the- 
orist in what direction historic force must move. It is 
wisest to admit this, once for all ; to cheer on the win- 
ners and to let the devil take the hindmost. Such con- 
duct, no doubt, is far from the ideal tenacity of 
uncompromising and irreconcilable devotees; you can 
never instinctively love it in such manner as that in 
which, when causes are finally and safely lost, you 
romantically love the passionate adherence of those 
who sacrificed themselves — the Jacobites, for example, 
or the Tories of the American Revolution. But the 
Trimmers of certain epochs have a tenacity of their 
own, — a tenacity not of ideals, which they deem follies, 
but of cool common-sense. And common-sense, though 
never stirring or at first flush inspiring, is in many 
aspects admirable. 

Once more we may seem to be losing ourselves in 



350 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

some labyrinth of casuistry. Nothing could be further 
from my purpose. Far as we have strayed from the 
landmarks of precise historic facts, we have always 
been students of literary history. Our chief business 
together has not been critical, still less polemic; it 
has really been historical, but historical in a way 
which must often have seemed bafflingly indefinite. 
We have been attempting to trace the course of that 
vague yet undeniable thing, the temper of a nation, 
during a century when it underwent a marked and 
lasting change. In our effort to perceive and to under- 
stand this change, we have tried, again and again, to put 
ourselves for the moment into sympathy with one aspect 
of it or another; and except sympathetically, I have 
tried throughout neither to praise nor to blame, but only 
to set forth what seems to me to have been the truth. 
So, in that hasty summary of Dryden's work, what 
I had chiefly in mind was no wish to condemn him 
or to defend him. It was only to present him in an 
aspect which should show, as clearly as possible, the 
manner in which his career exemplifies how the later, 
reintegrating literature of the seventeenth century came 
to lack the three characteristics which had marked the 
integral English literature of Elizabethan times. That 
earlier literature, we have often reminded ourselves, 
was spontaneous, enthusiastic, and versatile. Dryden 
never seems unthinkingly spontaneous; he is rather 
stoutly deliberate. He never seems enthusiastic; for 
all the boldness of his manner, he rather seems coolly 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 351 

sensible. And although his work is far from monoto- 
nous, you can hardly feel him to have been precisely 
versatile; instead, the increasing assertiveness of his 
couplets and the growingly definite rhythm of his 
prose, at once vernacular and formally literary, indi- 
cate more and more adherence to soundly sensible 
convention. And as to the substance of his work, it 
seems serious only when we regard it as unmixed 
literature. Dryden was burdened with r,o deep sense 
of mission or of message. His dramas, tragedies 
and comedies alike, are not poems, they are only stage- 
plays, made for such audiences as the notes of Pepys 
give us a glimpse of before the curtain. His satires 
are full of historical interest ; but they are hardly more 
profound or sincere than the diatribes of partisan 
journalism during the nineteenth century. His trans- 
lations and adaptations are only restatements, in vigor- 
ously fluent vernacular terms, of matters which in their 
earlier forms were apt to have the grace of a far less 
sophisticated simplicity. His prose, which seems on 
the whole the best and most earnest of his work, is 
chiefly an admirably clear and spirited setting forth 
of increasingly cultivated good sense concerning lit- 
erary matters. The thing you grow to like about him 
best is that with the years he ripened and sweetened. 

The folio volume of "Fables," which he carelessly 
flung together in the last months of his life, to meet 
some technical contract with the publisher Tonson, 
is a pleasant book to take, now and again, from your 



352 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

shelves. It is not only Dryden's last work; it is the final 
work as well of those forty years of English history 
whose beginning is so vividly recorded by Pepys. And 
as you turn the pages, whether of the preface which 
has lingered among the masterpieces of English criti- 
cism, or of the various poems which follow it, you can 
feel, for all the big carelessness of the compilation, that 
here, stronger and better than you would have dared 
dream, are all the virtues, all the merits which you 
could detect in the literature of the Restoration, with 
hardly any trace left of the baseness and the vileness 
which at first seemed bound to overwhelm them. Even 
amid the excesses we could perceive something like 
disdain for prating mendacity; it is better, the worst 
of these profligates seems to have thought, that we 
should admit and proclaim the full abomination of 
fact, than that we should cantingly preach ideals which 
give fact the lie. And in this mood we can detect the 
germ of one which in its maturity was to assume a 
form very different from the reckless and profligate 
cynicism of its first flush. For good sense, grown 
to the point of rationally recognizing the things 
which are admirable, and of quietly clinging to them 
as demonstrable certainties, may be no very edifying 
phase of human nature. At least, however, it is a 
sweet, and a sound, and a strong, and a safe one. And 
that is what one feels in the utterances of Dryden's 
later years. And that, I think, has been the underlying 
strength of England from Dryden's time to our own. 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 353 

It would have been pleasant to dwell on this, as I 
meant to do at first. But our time grows very short. 
We can linger over Dryden no longer; and we can 
hardly glance at the one other aspect of his time on 
which I should most have liked to dwell also. By the 
terms of the foundation which has brought us together, 
we were compelled to devote ourselves to the consider- 
ation of some period in the literature of England. As 
I told you at the beginning, I chose the seventeenth 
century for two reasons. The first was that this 
century — the century of Shakspere, and of Milton, and 
of Dryden; the century which began with full Eliza- 
bethan integrity, which passed through the disintegra- 
tion typified by dominant Puritanism, and which ended 
with a reintegration hardly yet crumbling — marks the 
greatest change in national temper which has yet de- 
clared itself in the history of England. The second 
reason came nearer to my heart ; this same seventeenth 
century was that in which America parted from the 
mother country. So throughout I have tried to keep 
in view the fact, which seems to me, as an American, 
most significant of all, — the fact that, while England 
was undergoing her transformation into modernity, 
there was no similar change across the seas, where the 
elder temper had lingered on almost till the present day. 

If time had served, I should have tried to illus- 
trate this by comparing with the later writings of 
Dryden the one work of seventeenth century Amer- 
ica which has any claim to permanence in English 



354 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

literature, the "Magnalia" of Cotton Mather. Flung 
together almost as carelessly as Dryden's "Fables," 
and almost at the same time, this prose epic of 
emigrant Puritanism is as characteristic of King 
William's New England as Dryden's work is of the 
England where King William reigned in the flesh. 
And even now I cannot resist the impulse, as we hasten 
toward our farewell, of putting before you a single 
phrase, in which, during the years when Dryden's 
power was at its sweetest and ripest, Cotton Mather 
characterized the first minister of our New England 
Cambridge. Thomas Shepard was his name, an Em- 
manuel man, who put his name on the college books the 
year before the Pilgrims landed at Yankee Plymouth. 
And he made his way to America in time, and there 
died at last, full of years and of honors. And the 
sentence in which Cotton Mather keeps his memory 
alive is this — "In fine, the character of his daily con- 
versation was a trembling walk with God." 

Those words are almost literally contemporary, I 
believe, with "Alexander's Feast"; but they belong, 
in spirit, to the days before the dominance of English 
Puritanism was broken. Compare them with any 
stanza of Dryden's chief ode. The contrast tells the 
story of the parting of your country and of mine, two 
hundred years ago, and more. 

From that day to this neither has quite understood 
the other. To such of us as love the inestimable tradi- 
tions we must always cherish in common, there can 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 355 

consequently come no more eager pleasure than that 
which arises from any effort to help our countries tow- 
ard some better understanding in future. When I met 
you first, I tried to express in anticipation a pleasure of 
which the reality has proved even more deep than I 
should have dared expect. Your Cambridge has re- 
ceived me with a kindness so constant and so confi- 
dent that I have long ago ceased to feel myself here 
away from home. Quite what this means, perhaps, 
none but an American can wholly understand. It 
means a welcome not only to your pleasant life of 
this century through which we are living together, 
but also to some personal share in those wonderful 
memories and traditions which will always make 
this English Cambridge a goal of pilgrimage for 
my countrymen. It means, for me, a new, wonder- 
ful, lasting sense of human fellowship with your 
worthies — on so many of whom we have hastily 
touched together. It means a debt which nothing can 
repay, — which I can only try thus simply to acknowl- 
edge. The best I can hope is that in time to come 
you may remember, as gently as you have welcomed, 
my effort to tell how that subtle, certain thing — the 
national temper of England, at a critical period in 
its history — presents itself to a mind moulded under 
influences purely American. If the memory lingers, 
even with a few, I shall have done the little in my power 
to strengthen the forces which now, so happily, are 
drawing our countries once more together. 



INDEX 



Bacon, Francis (1561-1626), 175, 

183 
Bank of England, 346 
Baxter, Richard (1615-1691), 203, 

265 
Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), 

and Fletcher, John (1579-1625), 

77-84 
Bible, 169-175, 216 
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), 

198-202 
Browne, William, of Tavistock 

(1591-1643?), 129, 134, 149 
Bunyan, John (162 8-1 688), 339- 

343 
Burton, Robert (15 77-1640), 192- 

197 
Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 323, 

335-337 



Calvinism, 217-224 

Campion, Thomas (d. 1619), 102, 

146 
Carew, Thomas (15987-1639?), 

137-139- 153 
Cavaliers, or Royalists, 248-250 
Chapman, George (i559?-i634), 

58-62 



Character- writing, 166-168 
Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667), 

i45> 345 
Crashaw, Richard (1613-1649), 
142, 264 

D 

Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), 104 
Davenant, Sir William (1606- 

1668), 145, 345 
Davies, Sir John (1569-1626), 106 
Dekker, Thomas (i57o?-i64i ?), 

69-71, 75 
Denham, Sir John (1615-1669), 

146 
Donne, John (1573-1631), 119-127, 

164 
Drama, Elizabethan, 29-44; later, 

46-100 
Drayton, Michael (i563-i63i),io4 
Drummond, William, of Hawthorn- 
den (1585-1649), 62, 66, no, 

in, 119 
Dryden, John (1 631-1700), 7, 8, 

146, 346-353 



Euphuisrr see Lily 
Evolutic i of literature, 30, 47-50, 
57, 85, 94, 128, 145 



357 



358 



INDEX 



Falkland, Lucius Cary, Lord 

(i6io?-i643), 136 
Fletcher, Giles (i588?-i623), 129- 

134 
Fletcher, John, see Beaumont 
Fletcher, Phineas (1 582-1 650), 

*33> 134 
Ford, John (fl. 1639), 93-95, 137 
Foxe, John (1516-1587), 14-16, 

214 
Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), 166, 

167, 202 



Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 176, 

210 
Gosse, Edmund, 146 
Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624), 20, 

98 
Greene, Robert (i56o?-i592), 34- 

37 
Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke 
(1554-1628), 122 



H 



Habington, William (1605-165 4), 

136, 140 
Hall, Joseph (1574-1656), 106, 

166, 167 
Harvey, William (15 78-1 65 7), 202 
Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, 

Lord ( 1 583-1 648), 119, 122, 264 
Herbert, George (1593-1633), 142, 

166, 167, 264 
Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 146- 

153 



£. ¥& 

Heywood, Thomas (d. 1650?), 69, 

7i-73 
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 203 
Hooker, Richard (i554?-i6oo), 

14, 160 
Hutchinson, John (1615-1654), 

264 



Jonson, Ben. (i573 ? -i°37), 50, 
62-68, 90, 110-120, 147, 163 



K 



Kyd, Thomas (i557 ? -i595 ? )> 34. 
•35. 37. 9°> 93 



Learning, English, 192, 197, 198, 

271, 346 
Lee, Sidney, 34, 40, 55 
Lily, John (i554?-i6o6), 16-20, 

3 2 . 34-3 6 . l6l > 177 
Literature, defined, 2, 155 
Literature in America, 7 
Little Gidding, 16, 264 
Locke, John (163 2-1 704), 346 
Lovelace, Richard (1 618-1658), 

140 
Lyrics, Elizabethan, 13, 44; later, 

47, 101-154 

M 

Marlowe, Christopher(i564-i593), 

33"37» 5°> 5 2 » 6l > 8 4. 9 1 * 93 
Marston, John (1575 ?-i634), 57, 

75. 93» 106 



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